Amazon Turns 30: What’s Next for ‘The Everything Company’?

Three decades after Amazon was founded, it’s difficult to comprehend the scale of its operations.

Consider its vast warehouse in Dartford, on the outskirts of London. It has millions of items in stock, hundreds of thousands of them purchased every day – and it takes two hours from the moment something is ordered, the company says, before it is picked, packed and shipped.

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

Even if you think you can imagine this endless web of packages crisscrossing the globe, there’s something else you need to remember: This is just a fraction of what Amazon does.

It’s also 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 powers huge swaths of the Internet (Amazon Web Services); and much more.

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

“It’s so big and so pervasive and touches so many different aspects of life that after a while, people start to take Amazon’s presence in different parts of their daily lives for granted,” he says.

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

Amazon’s story, since it was founded in 1994 by Jeff Bezos, is one of dynamic growth and constant innovation.

But the big question as the company enters its fourth decade is: Once you become The Everything Company, what will you do next?

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

“Once you get to half a trillion dollars in revenue, which you already are, how do you continue to grow double-digits year after year?”

One option is to try to combine existing businesses: The vast amounts of shopping data Amazon has for its Prime members could help sell ads on the streaming service, which — like its competitors — is increasingly turning to ads as a revenue source.

But that’s not all – what benefits can Kuiper, a satellite division, bring to the Whole Foods supermarket chain?

Sucharita Kodali says part of the solution is to “keep trying” at new business ventures and not worry if they fail.

This week, Amazon shut down its business robot line after just nine months. Ms. Kodali says it’s just one of “a whole graveyard of bad ideas” the company tried and discarded in order to find the good ones.

But she thinks Amazon may need to focus on something else: the increasing scrutiny from regulators who are asking tough questions like what they are doing with our data, what impact they are having on the environment, and are they simply too big?

All of these problems could prompt intervention, “just as we managed to break up monopolies that became giants in the early 20th century,” Ms. Kodali says.

For Juozas Kaziukėnas, founder of e-commerce data analytics company Marketplace Pulse, the company’s size creates another problem: the places where its Western customers live simply can’t handle more stuff.

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

This makes emerging economies like India, Mexico and Brazil important. However, as Mr. Kaziukėnas suggests, Amazon does not need to simply enter the market, but to have some presence there.

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

Amanda Mull points to Amazon’s next priority for the coming years: keeping out competition from Chinese rivals like Temu and Shein.

Amazon, it says, has “shaped the shopping habits” of Western consumers by acting as a trusted intermediary between them and Chinese manufacturers, and by offering easy returns and lightning-fast delivery.

But if you remove that last piece of the deal, you can drive prices down, just like Chinese retailers have done.

“They said, ‘If you wait a week or 10 days for something you buy just for fun, we can give it to you for next to nothing,’” Ms. Mull says. That’s an attractive proposition for many people, especially in these times of cost-of-living crises.

Juozas Kaziukėnas is not so sure, suggesting that new retailers will remain “niche” and that something much more fundamental will be needed to challenge Amazon’s position.

“When it comes to making purchases being about going to a search bar, Amazon does a great job of handling that,” he says.

Thirty years ago, a start-up company saw new trends in Internet usage and realized they had the potential to transform first retail and then many other things.

Mr Kaziukėnas says that for this to happen again, a similar leap of imagination will be needed, perhaps involving artificial intelligence.

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