Amazon

Stock performance

History

Jeff Bezos started Amazon as an online bookstore run out of a garage in Seattle, then deliberately expanded into a broader e-commerce marketplace, absorbing years of losses in pursuit of scale and customer loyalty rather than early profit. The company survived the dot-com crash and built out third-party seller marketplaces, Prime membership, and its own logistics network, turning retail scale into a platform business. Its most consequential move came from an internal infrastructure need: the cloud-computing division built to run Amazon's own systems, launched publicly as Amazon Web Services in 2006, created an entirely new business that now generates most of the company's profit.

Business model

Amazon operates a low-margin, high-volume retail and logistics business alongside two much higher-margin businesses: Amazon Web Services (cloud infrastructure) and a fast-growing advertising arm that sells placement on its retail site. Prime membership fees lock in customer loyalty and cross-subsidize retail investment, while third-party sellers using Amazon's marketplace and fulfillment network now account for the majority of units sold. The combination — retail scale, cloud infrastructure, and advertising — gives Amazon several distinct profit engines under one roof.

Market position

Amazon is the largest e-commerce retailer in the US and most of the Western world, though it faces intense competition from Walmart in general retail and from fast-growing Chinese-founded platforms like Shein and Temu in low-cost goods. AWS remains the largest cloud infrastructure provider globally, ahead of Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, though its share has been gradually eroding as rivals grow faster. Its logistics network, built over two decades, is a scale advantage few competitors can replicate.

Country impact

Amazon is one of the largest private employers in the United States, with a vast logistics and warehouse workforce alongside its corporate and engineering staff, and its labor practices and unionization fights are closely watched as bellwethers for the broader warehouse and gig economy. AWS underpins a significant share of internet infrastructure used by other American businesses and startups, and Amazon's dominance of online retail has reshaped how US consumers shop and how smaller retailers compete.