
By Jnan Dash | Article Rating: |
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October 27, 2017 06:56 PM EDT | Reads: |
139 |

This morning Jeff Bezos beat his nemesis from the same town Bill Gates as the richest man on the planet with his worth exceeding $90B. This was due to a huge surge in Amazon’s stock price (over $128 rise) to $1100 plus today. Their 3Q results came out yesterday and Amazon grew its revenue by 34% and profits inched up as well. There were fears that heavy investments in new warehouses and hiring workers would push it to a loss. This year Amazon’s stock started at $750. What a run!
Here are the numbers. Revenue soared 34% to a record $43.74B, a first for a non-holiday period, as the internet retail giant spread its ambitions with the acquisition of Whole Foods Market Inc. and widened its lead in cloud computing. Profit increased 1.6% to $256M, despite the costs bulging by 35%, a five-year high. I was surprised to know that Amazon employs 541,900 people, an increase from last quarter’s 382,400. Roughly 87,000 employees were added from Whole Foods. Now Amazon commands some 43.5% of e-commerce sales this year, compared with 38.1% last year.
I remember during the dot.com crash, everyone wrote off Amazon. When they ridiculed Bezos for a no-profit company with a bleak future, he jokingly replied, ” I spell profit as ‘prophet'”. He has come a long way with his prophetic vision and masterful execution.
The best addition to Amazon’s two core businesses (books and e-commerce) was the introduction of AWS as the cloud computing infrastructure back in 2004. First came S3 (simple shared storage) when Bezos convinced start-up companies to rent storage at one-hundredth of the cost of buying from bi vendors. Then EC2 (Elastic Computing Cloud) was added and that took off in a big way, especially with capital-starved startups with unpredictable computing needs. Pretty soon, Amazon took the credit of being the ‘father of cloud computing’ beating big incumbents like IBM, HP, etc. Now AWS is a huge business growing fast and bringing in about $16B revenue with over 60% profit. AWS is making a difference to the bottom line. Microsoft is trying hard to catch up with its Azure cloud and so is Google with its GCE (Google Computing Cloud). Today’s AWS is a very rich stack with its own database as a service (Redshift, Dynamo, and Aurora), elastic Map-Reduce, serverless offering with Lambda, and much more.There are predictions that AWS could one day be the biggest business for Amazon.
While the pacific north-west remains to be the home of the richest man on earth, the title shifts to Bezos from Gates.

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Published October 27, 2017 Reads 139
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Jnan Dash is Senior Advisor at EZShield Inc., Advisor at ScaleDB and Board Member at Compassites Software Solutions. He has lived in Silicon Valley since 1979. Formerly he was the Chief Strategy Officer (Consulting) at Curl Inc., before which he spent ten years at Oracle Corporation and was the Group Vice President, Systems Architecture and Technology till 2002. He was responsible for setting Oracle's core database and application server product directions and interacted with customers worldwide in translating future needs to product plans. Before that he spent 16 years at IBM. He blogs at http://jnandash.ulitzer.com.
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