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Case Study

Amazon: Success, survival or suicide?

By Jacques Horovitz, Nirmalya Kumar and Ursula Hilliard

27 pages

August 2000

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Reference: IMD-3-0922

From July 1995 to July 2000, Jeff Bezos has built Amazon.com into a $1.6 billion company that sold everything from books to power tools. Bezos’s ultimate objective was to create “the world’s most customer -centric company where customers can find and discover anything they want to buy online.” The company now sold over 18 million products to over 22 million customers; it was the 48th most recognised brand worldwide. Despite the company’s success, Amazon had never generated a penny’s profit. It had accumulated debt of over $2 billion and accumulated losses of $1.2 billion. The case raises the question of the future of Amazon: would it succeed now that it had reached, what Bezos referred to as the “tipping point” or was it a game of business suicide when the company would eventually run out of money and financial supporters?

Keywords

Internet, eCommerce, Customer Services, Book, Retail

Settings

World/global
1994-2000

Type

Published Sources

Available Languages

English

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