Amazon

Description

Website: www.amazon.com
Founder: Jeff Bezos
Founded: 1994
Wikipedia: wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_(company)
NASDAQ: AMZN

Amazon is one of the most famous companies with its subsidiaries around the world. Along with Google, Apple, and Microsoft, it is considered as one of the biggest technology companies. Amazon started its journey as an e-commerce website, with its subsidiaries, it offers many other services and products to its customers. Amazon also made his founder one of the richest people alive.

Amazon was founded by Jeff Bezos in 1994. He has chosen the name Amazon because it was exotic and different. For the first few years, the company only sold books online. In 1997, Amazon went public and the following year it started selling video games, consumer electronics, software, and toys. It became one of the most popular e-commerce websites in a short time.

In 2002, Amazon launched its one of the most profitable services, Amazon Web Services, or AWS for short. In the following years, the company grew its cloud solutions portfolio and became the biggest cloud service provider. After gaining popularity, the company debuts Amazon Prime in 2005 for its over 100 million members worldwide. The company also tried producing mobile devices, introduced Kindle, an electronic reading device that allows users to download ebooks wireless in 2007 and its first and last smartphone, Fire phone in 2014.

During its journey, Amazon made some acquisitions also. The company acquired Audible, spoken audio entertainment seller and producer for $300 million in 2008. Amazon also bought the social cataloging website, Goodreads, that had over 650,000 members and over 10 million books in 2013. Amazon’s one of the most important acquisitions was a live streaming platform, Twitch. Twitch was a spin-off of the streaming service Justin.tv and it was acquired by Amazon in 2014 for $970 million. In the following years, Bezos’ company acquired the supermarket chain, Whole Foods Market. In 2017, the merger between Amazon and Whole Foods Market was approved.