Amazon turns 30: What’s next for ‘The Everything Company’?

Amazon’s magnitude is difficult to comprehend three decades after it was founded.
Consider its vast warehouse in Dartford, on the outskirts of London. It has millions of stock goods, with hundreds of thousands purchased every day – and it takes two hours from the time an order is placed for it to be chosen, packed, and sent, according to the firm.
Now visualise same scene and magnify it by 175. That is the number of “fulfilment centres,” as Amazon refers to them, that it has across the world.
Even if you think you can envision that never-ending flurry of goods crisscrossing the world, you need to remember something else:

It is also a major streamer and media firm (Amazon Prime Video), a market leader in home camera systems (Ring), smart speakers (Alexa), tablets and e-readers (Kindle), a host and support for enormous portions of the internet (Amazon Web Services), and much more.
“For a long time, it has been called ‘The Everything Store’, but I think, at this point, Amazon is sort of ‘The Everything Company’,” says Bloomberg’s Amanda Mull.
“It’s so large and so omnipresent and touches so many different parts of life, that after a while, people sort of take Amazon’s existence in all kinds of elements of daily life sort of as a given,” according to her.

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Or, as the company itself once joked, pretty much the only way you could get though a day without enriching Amazon in some way was by “living in a cave”.

So, since Jeff Bezos launched Amazon in 1994, the company has experienced exponential growth and constant reinvention.
There has also been plenty of criticism along the way, including “severe” working conditions and how much tax it pays.
But, as it approaches its fourth decade, the fundamental concern appears to be: what happens next once you’ve become The Everything Company?
Or, as Sucharita Kodali, an analyst with Forrester Research, puts it: “What the heck is left?”

“Once you’re at a half a trillion dollars in revenue, which they already are, how do you continue to grow at double digits year over year?”
One approach is to try to connect existing businesses: Amazon’s massive volumes of shopping data for its Prime members may help it sell ads on its streaming service, which, like its competitors, is increasingly reliant on commercials for revenue.
But it only goes so far; what advantages can Kuiper, its satellite company, provide to Whole Foods, its retail chain?
To some extent, adds Sucharita Kodali, the approach is to “keep taking swings” at new business endeavours and not be concerned if they fail.

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Just this week Amazon killed a business robot line after only nine months – Ms Kodali says that it is just one of a “whole graveyard of bad ideas” the company tried and discarded in order to find the successful ones.

But, she says, Amazon may also have to focus on something else: the increasing attention of regulators, asking difficult questions like what does it do with our data, what environmental impact is it having, and is it simply too big?

All of these issues could prompt intervention “in the same way that we rolled back the monopolies that became behemoths in the early 20th century”, Ms Kodali says.

For Juozas Kaziukėnas, founder of e-commerce intelligence firm Marketplace Pulse, its size poses another problem: the places its Western customers live in simply can not take much more stuff.

“Our cities were not built for many more deliveries,” he tells the BBC.

That makes emerging economies like India, Mexico and Brazil important. But, Mr Kaziukėnas, suggests, there Amazon does not just need to enter the market but to some extent to make it.

“It’s crazy and maybe should not be the case – but that’s a conversation for another day,” he says.

Amanda Mull points to another priority for Amazon in the years ahead: staving off competition from Chinese rivals like Temu and Shein.

Amazon, she says, has “created the spending habits” of western consumers by acting as a trusted intermediary between them and Chinese manufacturers, and bolting on to that easy returns and lightening fast delivery.

But remove that last element of the deal and you can bring prices down, as the Chinese retailers have done.

“They have said ‘well, if you wait a week or 10 days for something that you’re just buying on a lark, we can give it to you for almost nothing,'” says Ms Mull – a proposition that is appealing to many people, especially during a cost of living crisis.

Juozas Kaziukėnas is not so sure – suggesting the new retailers will remain “niche”, and it will take something much more fundamental to challenge Amazon’s position.

“For as long as going shopping involves going to a search bar – Amazon has nailed that,” he says.

Thirty years ago a fledging company spotted emerging trends around internet use and realised how it could upend first retail, then much else besides.

Mr Kaziukėnas says for that to happen again will take a similar leap of imagination, perhaps around AI.

“The only threat to Amazon is something that doesn’t look like Amazon,” he says.