Amazon: 2019 Revenues and Future Developments

Amazon, the company founded in 1994 by Jeff Bezos, after a departure in the sale of books, continues to grind profits and differentiated in its offer. I took a look at the consolidated financial statements of 2019 to deepen the sources of income and stimulate future trajectories.

Amazon has a market capitalization of about 1.5 trillion dollars, at the levels of the other giants already analyzed: Microsoft, Apple and Alphabet.

In 2019 the profits were 11.6 billion and the revenues, generated for 69% in the United States, of 280.5 billion divided as follows:

• amazon.com., the network's most popular store, generated revenues of more than 141 billion, equal to half of the total revenue. A growth of 15% compared to 2018. It must be said that in this revenue item the revenues of third parties who sell through the site are not accounted for.

• the second source of revenue is represented by the services offered to third party vendors on the Amazon platform, including storage and transportation services. The so-called marketplace, which intermediates the sales of others, is worth around 54 billion (+ 26%).

• third pillar is Amazon Web Services, the cloud offer of computational, storage and database services to companies, which generates 35 billion in revenues (+ 36.5%).

• from Prime subscriptions the company gets 19 billion (+ 35.6%)

• physical stores, mainly those of the Whole Foods chain acquired in 2017, produce just over 17 billion. Single voice in slight decline.

• finally 14 billion derive from other activities, mainly that of the nascent online advertising business on the sites managed by the company, primarily amazon.com. This is the item that records the highest growth rate, equal to 39% compared to the previous year.

Amazon will continue to grow in ecommerce in the coming years, especially outside the US. But even in the domestic market there is still room for Bezos to have around 35-40% of the US online trade, but only 6% of the retail trade in the same territory. This will also be possible thanks to investments in logistics automation and in the testing of robots and drones to cover the last mile of delivery.

Maintaining leadership in the cloud computing segment will be increasingly difficult given the determination of competitors. Today AWS has 33% of the world market, the rest is fragmented between Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Alibaba Cloud and others.

Growth in the online advertising sector overseen by Google and Facebook is promising, but we are still far from the leaders. Some element of innovation will be needed to take off. Some big acquisitions are possible in the coming months.

Finally, it will be interesting to see if Amazon will be able to expand and exploit the potential of the Alexa ecosystem.

Amazon launches Recommerce, the service that buys your smartphones (even broken ones) in exchange for refunds

In the past few hours, Amazon has become the protagonist of a series of prominent smartphone initiatives. After communicating a day one discount for the new OnePlus Nord, the e-commerce giant has made official the arrival of Amazon Recommerce, which allows you to exchange your old (or new) smartphone with an equivalent refund.

To do this Amazon relies on Recommerce Group (a third party company) for the collection and evaluation of devices, based on some well-defined parameters:

• External appearance, three distinct degrees: Perfect, Good, Damaged.
• Ignition: It lights up correctly or not.
• Operation of the display and all buttons: yes or no.
• For iPhone only: the "Locate My iPhone" feature has been disabled (yes or no)

Once these steps have been carried out, the site will give you a rough indication of the value of the device, and then invite you to continue the data entry procedure. Just for information, a Samsung Galaxy S8 in impeccable condition is valued at around € 104, while an iPhone 11 Pro 256 GB in the same state is valued at € 409.

Once the device is received, the Recommerce team will begin the on-site assessment procedure, to verify that the conditions declared by the user coincide with the state of affairs. Once this is done (the procedure is carried out within 48 hours of receiving the material), the customer will receive a credit on the support account.

Finally, for the benefit of those who intend to scrape the smartphone, Recommerce offers to collect the device at home completely free of charge (the withdrawal in this case is to be agreed with the courier, on the site there is a short guided procedure). If you want to try to evaluate your device or you are serious about using the service, this is the direct link that is right for you.