The latest issue of The Economist magazine published a column

An obscure garage can often breed an extraordinary High-tech company, but Amazon, the most recent issue of The Economist, has opted for a path of development and has been firmly on the road for more than 20 years. Amazon's success has proved to the world: the constant pursuit of development is the company always invincible the hard truth.

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In the summer of 1994, Bezos (Jeff Bezos) resigned from work on Wall Street and flew to Bezos Texas (Fort Worth Fort) with his wife Mackenzie Besos (MacKenzie worth) and rented a car there. As Mackenzie drove to the Pacific Northwest, Jeff started a sales catalog retailer that could make the most of Internet technology. Subsequently, a garage in the suburbs of Seattle became Amazon's first office space. And a year later, Amazon sold the company's first book in its history.

Since then, the world has witnessed the rise of a book sales website, and that Amazon is still an online bookstore. But Bezos's ambition is far more than that. Books are really a good way to get into online retailing: Once you're familiar with the online book-buying process, people will buy more. Amazon will therefore be able to capture more data on consumer demand. If someone comments on the goods they buy, it will also enrich the shopping experience of other shoppers. Bezos also found a virtuous circle in the industry: Low prices boosted sales to attract customers and businesses, while high sales in turn contributed to lower prices. As long as companies put their clients ' interests first, this virtuous cycle can bring growth to the company. Bezos first registered the company name as "relentless.com" (meaning "ruthless" website). Although the name was somewhat lacking in emotion, it was a good highlight of Bezos's ambition.

Shopping phone turned out

Amazon unveiled the company's first smartphone Fire Phone this June 18, a move that once again makes perfect interpretations of Bezos's ambitions. In addition to having a slim design, Fire phone has a distinctive personality design in a number of ways, and the 3D screen is one of them. The object recognition function firefly can identify specific objects, two-dimensional code, images, sound, video and other information, and then can guide users to purchase the relevant identification products on the Amazon website. If the design is the same, Fire phone is fully capable of turning the handset into a shopping window.

Amazon is always able to anticipate the changing trends of consumer reading and shopping habits and respond in a timely fashion. By introducing products such as ipad-like tablet devices, E-book readers and TV set-top boxes for streaming video, Amazon is starting to compete directly with Apple and Google, and Apple and Google are also offering hardware products, digital content and services to consumers. Amazon wants the functionality and quality of its products to be a major selling point, making the company's hardware devices the same consumer appeal as online stores. Then, the consumer will naturally buy other peripheral products.

Amazon's share of retail sales across the U.S.

According to data released by the retail media internet retailer, Amazon sells more than 230,000 kinds of goods in the U.S. market, about 30 times times the type of goods Wal-Mart sells. Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer, also has a fast-growing online business. Last year, Amazon's total annual revenue was 74.5 billion dollars. However, Amazon's annual revenue will be close to doubling if it calculates the products sold by other vendors through Amazon's Third-party trading platform, Marketplace said. Although it has become the largest online retailer in the US, Amazon's annual revenue growth rate is still higher than the 17% average in the E-commerce market. And in the European and Japanese markets, Amazon is also the top online retailer and has begun to lay out the Chinese market. Amazon is the world's Nineth-largest retailer, according to last year's annual revenue. Amazon will become the world's second-largest retailer by 2018, according to Kantar Retail, a market-research agency.

In addition to its huge success in online retailing, Amazon has opened up two other disruptive businesses. The Kindle E-book Reader is the first to transfer people's reading from paper books to E-books, the U.S. E-book market in the annual revenue in the United States accounted for more than 10% of the book market, and Amazon has become the U.S. E-book market leader. Amazon also launched the cloud-based Pay-as service in 2006, and the current cloud service, called Amazon Web Services, has an annual revenue of $9 billion trillion and has dramatically reduced the technical cost of establishing and operating the company.

Amazon also has another advantage that most rivals envy: very patient shareholders. Last year, Amazon achieved a net profit of just 274 million dollars, which is hardly worth mentioning compared with its annual revenue and the market capitalisation of $154 billion trillion. Despite a slight fall in recent days, Amazon's current share price is still more than 500 times times earnings per share last year, at 34 times times the same rate as Wal-Mart. Amazon's core retail business is not much profitable, with net profits mostly from independent businesses on Amazon's Third-party trading platform, marketplace.

Amazon's success has also made a lot of enemies, including rivals that have been crushed by its relentless low-cost strategy, and some rivals are even being bought directly by Amazon. Amazon has been blamed for squeezing warehouse workers and tax avoidance in the US, Britain, France and Germany. The French Ministry of Culture is also regarded as "the disappearance of the physical bookstore," the chief culprit. For Stephen Colbert, a famous American comedian who is a traditional publisher Hachette shareholder, Bezos is Colbert "Balser death".

Fully build Prime member service

Amazon currently has about 25 million Prime service members, these members only pay a certain annual fee (US $99, UK GBP 79) can enjoy year-round shopping free postage activities and more digital content services. Scott Vil ChannelAdvisor, an E-commerce service provider, says Amazon's Prime members spend about four times times as much as Non-members and occupy 50% of all consumer spending on the Amazon platform.

Many of the activities Amazon has launched are designed to enhance the degree of adhesion of prime services. In April this year, Amazon packaged a TV show set up by the US cable company HBO for free viewing by Prime members, estimated at between 200 million and 250 million dollars. This June 12, Amazon added 100多万首 songs for Prime service. Amazon has also developed programs for Prime members, including several children's dramas. Prime members can "borrow" books for up to one months if they have a Kindle or tablet computer. This slow reader will no longer have to pay for it.

Amazon is very concerned about whether consumers have Kindle readers and tablet devices. The transition from using desktop shopping to mobile shopping is "the second wave of the entire E-commerce landscape," Sebastian Gunningham Sebastian Gunningham, head of Amazon Marketplace. Amazon's electronic devices are trying to capture this trend.

Amazon is fulfilling its promise in a step-by-step way from a Kindle that only reads e-books to a Kindle Fire tablet that can be shopped, and to today's Fire Phone smartphone. Compared with rival Apple and Google's devices, Amazon's hardware is not only inferior, but also has a price advantage. Amazon does not want to profit from the sale of hardware devices, but rather to integrate hardware devices with the company's other services, so that hardware devices into the Amazon shopping paradise carrier. Amazon offers prime for Fire Phone buyers a year of free membership to encourage consumers to familiarize themselves with Amazon's streaming services and free delivery.

In addition to the E-book reader market, Amazon's performance in other hardware devices is hard to satisfy. Apple and Google's tablet sales are easily outpacing the Kindle's Fire, partly because Amazon's online app store has far fewer software than the two rivals. However, the introduction of Fire phone shows that Amazon has not abandoned the market for hardware devices. "The battle for shoppers will be on the phone," said Eric Best of Mercent, an E-commerce software company. "And Amazon believes it's important to have a place in this market.

Amazon's rivals are constantly turning all types of screens into windows that show other merchant products. Google has started selling "Local catalog Ads" to guide shoppers to nearby shops, an online retail business that eliminates much of the cost of transporting storage centers and trucks. Google has even provided shoppers with images and prices similar to those on Amazon to enrich their search results. After Google's push for online retailing, Best has noticed a downward trend in Amazon's marketplace revenue growth.

Success stems from always adhering to

Some in the industry see Google as the biggest threat to Amazon, but others point out that Wal-Mart, with its E-commerce business, is the real enemy of Amazon, as Wal-Mart's e-commerce revenues are growing faster than Amazon's. China's Alibaba will also raise large sums of money through IPOs. Social E-commerce start-up site Wanelo also become a new round of network power business leader. And the mobile shopping platform Instacart even has launched the commodity "one hour delivery" service.

Faced with various challenges from the market, Bezos has consistently adhered to Amazon's "user-oriented" development strategy. Bezos a letter to shareholders in 1997 when Amazon went public, reminding them that Amazon can only take a long-term development strategy. But sticking to long-term development strategies requires a lot of money. Amazon was able to win in the early days of the company because it had no financial pressure to build and maintain storage. At present, the establishment of a large number of storage centers and data centers has also changed the relationship between Amazon's capital chain. And now the huge physical warehousing capacity has become Amazon's main attraction for businesses. Matt Bomer, an analyst at rich-Country securities (Wells Fargo Nomura), points out that Amazon's capital spending is still relatively small compared with traditional retailers. However, Amazon has completely said goodbye to the era of pressure-free capital.

Over the past five years, Amazon's cumulative free cash flow has reached $10 billion trillion, while the cumulative net profit for the same period was only $2.9 billion, Pomo said. For a company worth as much as $154 billion trillion, this net profit is indeed negligible. However, investors have been pinning their hopes on Amazon's rapid growth to raise net profit levels. A recent report by the Securities Research Institute, Wolfe, suggests that Amazon's share price is a little too low compared with the huge revenue figures.

In a television interview last year, Bezos admitted that the Amazon model "will one day be overturned", but he hopes it will not be staged in his lifetime. At least this scenario is hard to come by in the near future, not because Amazon always makes the right decisions, but because Bezos's decision to bet on customers, investors, technology and scale seems to have been rewarded. Moreover, Bezos has always chosen to take all the risks to persist.