Amazon (AMZN, Financial) is the category killer in an industry that it invented: customer-centricity. Over the past 20 years, Amazon has made massive investments in technology to offer a personalized commerce experience. Amazon has also relentlessly invested in its vast distribution and fulfillment infrastructure to introduce a game-changing customer relationship, the Amazon Prime subscription membership with free two-day delivery. And the company continues to push the envelope with a variety of same day delivery options, ever shrinking the time gap from the order to physical delivery.
Amazon is also extending its customer-centric approach to the business-to-business B2B marketplace with Amazon Web Services. AWS is a cloud computing platform that provides businesses with fast, cheap and flexible access to computing power. AWS is used by both big (including really big) and small companies alike. As a business, AWS is big (over $7 billion in annual revenues), profitable (21% operating margin in Q2) and growing fast (AWS revenue could increase 65% this year) and it is large enough to positively skew all of Amazon into profitable growth. With Prime and AWS, Amazon has built $12 –
13 billion in annual, recurring subscription based revenues.
From Meridian Growth Fund’s annual letter.
