As Amazon became the second US firm to hit a trillion-dollar value on the stock market, founder Jeff Bezos regained the crown as the richest person on the planet.
Amazon's share price has climbed during the year, lifting the personal wealth of the company's 54-year-old founder with it. Forbes estimated his net worth about $166 billion.
He has gone on record with a formula for success that includes taking bold bets, riding change and rebounding from setbacks.
"You need to be nimble and robust so you need to be able to take a punch and you also need to be quick and innovative and do new things at a higher speed, that's the best defense against the future," Bezos said in an interview published in Vanity Fair magazine last year.
"You have to always be leaning into the future. If you're leaning away from the future, the future is gonna win, every time."
- Tinkering toddler -
Jeffrey Preston Bezos's penchant for experimenting reportedly dates to a young age -- with one widely-recounted story telling that he tried to dismantle his own crib as a toddler.
His mother was a teenager when she gave birth to Bezos in Albuquerque, New Mexico, on January 12, 1964.
"You shaped us, you protected us, you let us fall, you picked us up, and you loved us, always and unconditionally," Bezos said in a Twitter message thanking his mom "for everything" on Mother's Day in May.
She remarried when her son was about four years old, and he was legally adopted by his Cuban immigrant stepfather who worked as an engineer at a major petrochemical company.
"My dad came here from Cuba all by himself without speaking English when he was 16 years old, and has been kicking ass ever since," Bezos said in a Father's Day tweet in June.
"Thank you for all the love and heart, Dad!"
His mother's family were settlers in Texas, where Bezos spent many a summer working at a ranch owned by a grandfather retired from a job as a regional director at the US Atomic Energy Commission.
Bezos was enchanted by computer science when the IT industry was in its infancy and he studied engineering at Princeton University.
After graduating, he put his skills to work on Wall Street, where by 1990 he had risen to be a senior vice president at investment firm D.E. Shaw.
He surprised peers by leaving his high-paid position about four years later to open an online bookseller called Amazon.com, which according to legend was started in a garage in a Seattle suburb. Bezos was backed by money borrowed from his parents.
Bezos went from being a boy with a love for how things work to being the man who built Amazon.com into an internet powerhouse.
Amazon grew to dominate commerce and become a formidable contender in cloud computing, streaming television, and artificial intelligence with its digital assistant Alexa.
- Long-term thinking -
Bezos has such a proven track record for shaking up the business sectors he enters that he has been dubbed "disruptor-in-chief."
Like his company, Bezos has transformed with time, shaving his head and bulking up his body with exercise. The results were immortalized in a series of photos taken at a conference last year.
A fan of science fiction and in particular the British author Iain Banks, Bezos has passions other than Amazon.
Bezos called Banks "a huge personal favorite" in a tweet early this year while announcing that Amazon Prime video service was working on a television series based on one of the author's novels.
Bezos has invested some $42 million in the building a 150-meter-tall clock designed to keep time for 10,000 years. Built inside a mountain in Texas, the clock will be powered by geothermal energy.
"Humans are now technologically advanced enough that we can create not only extraordinary wonders but also civilization-scale problems," Bezos said in a blog post devoted to the clock project.
"We're likely to need more long-term thinking."
Bezos is also behind private space exploration operation Blue Origin, into which he usually invests money from selling Amazon shares.
Blue Origin has outlined plans to build a spaceship and lunar lander capable of delivering cargo to the moon, perhaps to support colonies there.
With the purchase of The Washington Post in 2013, the Internet entrepreneur added a prestigious news operation to his investments.
The Post, and Bezos himself, have been targeted by US President Donald Trump. An open critic of Trump, Bezos has jokingly offered to send him into space.
Bezos has been married to Mackenzie Bezos, a writer, since 1993. They have four children.
source: news.abs-cbn.com
Amazon's journey from an online bookseller started in a garage to a global e-commerce powerhouse valued at a trillion dollars has centered on obsession with the long road.
The company initially incorporated as "Cadabra" by Jeff Bezos in 1994 and backed with money borrowed from his parents joined Apple as the second US technology firm to be valued at $1 trillion on Tuesday.
"It's funny comparing Apple and Amazon because they are very different companies," said independent technology analyst Rob Enderle.
"Apple is basically a one product company nowadays; Amazon is anything but."
While Apple makes most of its money from iPhones, the Amazon empire includes global e-commerce operations, cloud computing, artificial intelligence, streaming television, groceries and more.
Created in a garage in a suburb of Seattle, Washington, the company renamed "Amazon" sold its first book -- Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought by Douglas Hofstadter -- to a computer engineer in mid-1995.
By the end of that year, Amazon was selling books online throughout the US. Amazon went public in early 1997.
The company for more than a decade put growth over profit, investing heavily in warehouses, distribution networks, and data centers.
"Every cent they made they put back in the company," Enderle said of Amazon.
"They kept their eye on the prize, which was initially to take over most of commerce."
Innovation sans scandal
Neil Saunders of the research firm GlobalData said Amazon's success comes from the fact that it innovates unlike any other.
"This heady pace of creativity is the key reason why it stays several steps ahead of the market and is able to generate so much growth," Saunders said.
Bezos has kept firm control of Amazon, steering clear of hedge fund investors inclined to short-term tactics aimed at getting share prices to jump.
The founder and chief executive also avoided scandals or other distractions, keeping revenue and costs close enough to manage and easing into "adjacent markets" that play into Amazon strengths or interests, according to Enderle.
For example, Amazon Web Services cloud computing business is a lucrative business built on technology infrastructure that the company needed to run its own operations.
Investing in warehouses, trucking, drones, shipping and other distribution systems not only enables Amazon to drive down costs they position the company to compete with the likes of FedEx and UPS.
Buying Whole Foods grocery chain last year got Amazon established real world outlets while putting its delivery and retail smarts and systems to work in the brick-and-mortar world.
Drugs and digital ads
Prescription medicine would be a natural market for Amazon to expand into, according to Enderle Meanwhile, Amazon is reportedly beefing up its digital advertising business to better compete in an online ad market dominated by Google and Facebook.
In the past quarter, Amazon posted its best-ever profit of $2.5 billion as Bezos, whose Amazon stake has made him the world's richest person, highlighted the importance of the digital assistant Alexa that powers Amazon electronics along with cars, appliances and other connected devices.
According to the research firm eMarketer, Amazon's e-commerce revenue will grow more than 28 percent this year to reach $394 billion, and will account for 49 percent of US online retail sales and nearly five percent of all retail spending.
One of Amazon's revenue drivers is its Prime subscription service which offers streaming video and music, free delivery and other perks and which has more than 100 million members worldwide.
Arrogance trap
Some fear Amazon is becoming too dominant a force, especially in retail, sparking antitrust discussion even as the company keeps expanding globally and searches for a second headquarters in North America.
"It wasn't that long ago that people were freaking out about Walmart, and Amazon basically stepped on Walmart," analyst Enderle said.
"What Amazon means is disruption and people don't like to be disrupted."
Critics of the company include US President Donald Trump, who has expressed ire at the Bezos-owned Washington Post newspaper that has published stories the president didn't like.
Bezos bought the Washington Post five years ago for $250 million from his personal funds.
While his skills could be advantageous in the content-oriented business, getting into news comes with the risk of displeasing politicians.
"The Post was a mistake because it results in him going to war with people he wouldn't otherwise go to war with," Enderle said.
"You really don't want to go to war with the government."
Amazon's huge cloud computing segment powers systems for government clients, and contracts could be influenced by politics.
Amazon must also guard against the kind of arrogance that can undo companies that come to dominate markets, according to the analyst.
"When companies get big, it starts being about what you have the power to do and not what is right to do," Enderle said.
"If Amazon does have a downfall, it will be arrogance in dealing with the customer."
source: news.abs-cbn.com
NEW YORK - Online retail giant Amazon on Thursday opened its first brick and mortar bookstore in New York, selling a limited range of its highest-rated books and letting customers browse products as in times gone by.
Amazon, which launched as an online bookseller in 1995 but which now sells everything from designer clothes to groceries, bided its time before venturing into the US cultural capital. It launched brick and mortar bookstores in six other cities first, starting in its hometown Seattle in 2015.
"You don't run a marathon before you run a 5K," said Jennifer Cast, vice president of Amazon Books. "We wanted some time to learn and we also really wanted the right spot."
The New York store -- a modest 370 square meters (3,983 square feet) compared to the multi-storey premises of rival Barnes and Noble -- occupies a prime spot at Columbus Circle opposite Central Park.
The offerings are limited to just 3,000 titles, none of which have received fewer than four out of five stars by Amazon's online customers, who are invited to post their own reviews on the website.
There is also a "Page Turners" section dedicated to books that -- according to Amazon data -- customers have devoured in three days or less, and another to preferences of customers in the New York area.
Some of the store's first customers welcomed the arrival of a new book store in a city where many book vendors have been forced to shutter in recent years.
"It's just really exciting... that's so unusual," says freelance writer and mom of two Jennifer Rok.
"I always buy books online, so I don't know how frequently I will buy here as opposed to on the internet, but I missed just browsing," she said.
For Jannicke Remme, a researcher and tourist from Norway, it was a chance to browse a brick and mortar Amazon store not yet available in Europe. But she was less enthusiastic about the selection.
"You only see the bestsellers here, which means everybody is reading the same. That is not always nice," she said.
Amazon plans to open 13 more brick and mortar bookstores in the United States before the end of the year, including a second one in New York, due to open this summer.
source: news.abs-cbn.com
