Amazon turns 30: What’s next for “The Everything Company”? – BBC News

Three decades after its founding, it is difficult to imagine the size of Amazon.

One example of this is the huge warehouse in Dartford, a suburb of London. It has millions of items in stock, hundreds of thousands of which are purchased every day. And according to the company, it takes two hours from the time the order is placed for the goods to be picked, packed and dispatched.

Now imagine this scene and multiply it by 175. That’s the number of “fulfillment centers,” as Amazon likes to call them, that the company has around the world.

Even if you think you can imagine this never-ending stream of packages being shipped across the globe, there is one thing you must remember: This is only a fraction of what Amazon does.

In addition, the company is a major streaming and media company (Amazon Prime Video), a market leader in home camera systems (Ring), smart speakers (Alexa), tablets and e-readers (Kindle), hosts and supports large parts of the Internet (Amazon Web Services), and much more.

“For a long time it was called ‘The Everything Store,’ but I think Amazon is now something like ‘The Everything Company,'” Bloomberg’s Amanda Mull tells me.

“It’s so big and so pervasive and touches so many different areas of life that after a while people kind of take for granted the existence of Amazon in all sorts of elements of daily life,” she says.

Or, as the company itself once joked, the only way to get through a day without enriching Amazon in some way was to “live in a cave.”

The history of Amazon has been one of explosive growth and continuous reinvention since it was founded by Jeff Bezos in 1994.

But the most important question as the company enters its fourth decade seems to be: What do you do next once you are “The Everything Company”?

Or as Sucharita Kodali, who analyzes Amazon for the research firm Forrester, puts it: “What the hell is left?”

“Once you have half a trillion dollars in revenue, and you already have, how can you continue to grow at double-digit rates year after year?”

One possibility is to link existing businesses together: The vast amounts of shopping data Amazon has from its Prime members could help the company sell ads on its streaming service, which – like its competitors – is increasingly relying on commercials to generate revenue.

But that is not quite enough: What benefit can Kuiper, its satellite division, bring to its supermarket chain Whole Foods?

To some extent, says Sucharita Kodali, the answer is to “keep trying new business ventures” and not worry when they fail.

Just this week, Amazon canceled a line of business robots after just nine months. According to Ms. Kodali, this is just one of “a whole graveyard of bad ideas” that the company tried and discarded to find the successful ones.

But she believes Amazon also needs to focus on something else: the increasing attention of regulators who are asking difficult questions, such as: What does the company do with our data, what impact does it have on the environment, and is it simply too big?

All of these problems may require intervention, “in the same way we pushed back the monopolies that became giants in the early 20th century,” says Ms. Kodali.

For Juozas Kaziukėnas, founder of e-commerce information company Marketplace Pulse, the size of the market poses another problem: the places where the market’s Western customers live simply cannot accommodate much more stuff.

“Our cities are not designed to handle many more deliveries,” he tells the BBC.

This makes emerging countries such as India, Mexico and Brazil important. But, says Kaziukėnas, Amazon not only has to enter the market there, but also find its way there.

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

Amanda Mull points to another priority for Amazon in the coming years: fending off competition from Chinese rivals such as Temu and Shein.

Amazon, she says, has created “the buying habits” of Western consumers by acting as a trusted intermediary between them and Chinese manufacturers, while also offering easy returns and lightning-fast deliveries.

However, if you remove this final element of the deal, you can lower prices, as Chinese retailers have done.

“They said, ‘Well, if you wait a week or 10 days for something you buy on a whim, we can give it to you for almost nothing,'” Mull says – an offer that is attractive to many people, especially in times of cost-of-living crisis.

Juozas Kaziukėnas is not so sure. He believes that the new retailers will remain a “niche” and that a much more fundamental approach is needed to challenge Amazon’s position.

“As long as you have to use a search bar to shop, Amazon has it under control,” he says.

Thirty years ago, a young company discovered new trends in Internet usage and realized how it could revolutionize first the retail industry and then many other sectors.

For this to happen again, a similar leap of imagination is needed, possibly in the field of artificial intelligence, says Kaziukėnas.

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