In addition to its purchase of Whole Foods, the company bought Harvest.ai, a cybersecurity player, GameSparks, a game development platform, and Blink, a developer of home security cameras, while also expanding geographically with its acquisition of, a Middle Eastern e-commerce site. But highlights from our analysis include:Īmazon is growing more acquisitive. Amazon acquired 10 startups in 2017 - more than any other year on record. Given Amazon’s enormous breadth, we won’t be covering every aspect of its business. In this report, we dive into that “opaque” strategic vision, from Amazon’s investment and M&A history, to analysis of its patents, to initiatives across AI, media, AWS, and more. Amazon rarely explains either its near-term tactical aims or its long-term strategic vision. “ isn’t just secretive, the way Apple is, but in a deeper sense, Jeff Bezos’ e-commerce and cloud-storage giant is opaque. Understanding the many-headed beast that is Amazon is no easy feat, especially because the company is so much less transparent than many its peers. If Amazon is able to satisfy these lofty goals, it will be “the most aggressive expansion of a giant company in the history of modern business.” Morgan Stanley analysts have also set a price target at $2,000/share - or a market capitalization exceeding $1T - within the year. Wall Street banks like Morgan Stanley expect Amazon to continue growing at a rate that no company its size has ever done before, estimating 16% average compound growth in sales through 2025. While the company has been publicly traded for more than two decades, its market capitalization has swelled in recent years. And its insatiable appetite for new markets means competitors must always be on guard against its next moves.Īs the United States’ biggest online retailer, the company accounts for about 4% of all retail and about 44% of all e-commerce spending in the US. Today’s Amazon is far more than just an “everything store ” it’s a leader in consumer-facing AI and enterprise cloud services. This was the case with the launch of cloud business AWS in the mid-2000s, as well as the more recent consumer hit Amazon found with its Echo device and Alexa AI assistant. Of course, the company has had its share of missteps - the expensive Fire phone flop comes to mind - but Amazon is also rightly known for strokes of strategic genius that have launched it ahead of competitors in promising new industries.