Amazon.com in 2012: Some Fascinating Stats

There are some amazing stats regarding Amazon.com that I just dug up this morning. I’ve always been intrigued by Amazon’s business strategies and innovations. Today I decided to dive in and research on the revenues, visitors, and profit stats for the Amazon network.

The numbers game behind Amazon.com in 2012

There are several things that internet marketers can learn from Amazon’s way of doing business, which I shall cover in detail over the coming months, but take a look at these stats

Overall Revenue Stats

We won’t talk much about the share price fluctuation, but let’s take a sneak peek at the real numbers behind Amazon.com and its entire network.

Amazon’s 2011 revenue was $48.07 billion with an operating income of $862 million and a net income of $631 million.

Yes, the numbers are impressive but you also need to keep in mind that Amazon has an asset value over $28 billion and over 69,000 employees worldwide as of 2012.

Comparing the 2011 numbers with 2012 estimates

We have data from Amazon’s first 3 quarters of 2012, and estimates for the fourth quarter. Here’s a brief breakdown of the current situation and what’s in future for Amazon.

Q1 Revenue: $13.19 billion
Q1 Operating Income/Loss: $192 million (Income)
Q1 Net Income/Loss: $130 million (Income)
Q2 Revenue: $12.83 billion
Q2 Operating Income/Loss: $107 million (Income)
Q2 Net Income/Loss: $7 million (Income)
Q3 Revenue: $13.18 billion
Q3 Operating Income/Loss: $28 million (Loss)
Q3 Net Income/Loss: $274 million (Loss)

The operating and net losses that Amazon has incurred in the the last two quarters has been accounted for by their investments in Living Social, Kiva Systems, and other infra maintenance work.

Q4 promises to be the highlight of the year with Amazon estimating revenues exceeding $21 billion at an operating loss of about $350 million.

Estimation: Which basically means that Amazon will end up with a overall revenue of about $61 billion at an operating loss of about 140 million and a net loss of over $420 million.

What looks promising for Amazon is their net assets have grown substantially in 2012 which will pay dividends in the future. Although they will end up at a net loss for FY ending 2012, their revenues will be up by about 27 percent.

Kindle Fire

Not only does Kindle Fire (Standard and HD) remain the #1 bestselling, most gifted, and most wished for product among Amazon’s entire database of millions of products since its launch, but other digital products associated with Kindle, like Kindle books and accessories are among the top 10 bestselling products on Amazon.com.

According to Comscore, Kindle Fire has taken upto 54.4 percent market share of the Android tablet market. Although Amazon has not yet disclosed revenues generated from Kindle Fire sales yet, I dug up some data that might bring shed some light on the matter.

According to some figures given by Gartner, we can estimate a total of about 60 million Android tablets sold by end of 2012. Estimating a 50% market share (because Kindle Fire was released after Q2, 2011), that makes around 30 million Kindle Fire sold by the end of 2012.

Estimating a $200 per Kindle Fire (among Fire, Fire HD, and 8.9″ Fire HD) sold, we can assume Amazon has generated over $6 billion just from Kindle Fire sales. 

This does not include revenue generated from app sales, book sales, and accessory sales. All in all, we can safely assume the Kindle brand might capture 10% revenue share of Amazon by 2013.

AWS

Started in 2006, Amazon Web Services is an end-to-end proposition of companies and webmasters to host their websites, databases, and files on the Amazon network. AWS started getting popular from 2008, and it has grown by leaps and bounds over the last 4 years.

The core reason for its popularity lies in the fact that everyone (not only big corporations) have the opportunity to use the same network infrastructure that handles over 3 billion visitors annually. (more on that later)

Although, not a ‘profitable’ venture for Amazon since they have already done about 20 price cuts since 2006 due to intense competition from other IaaS players in this industry, their revenues have been up and promising since its launch.

AWS accounts for over $1 billion in revenue for Amazon, and analyzing current data we can conclude that AWS will add approximately $1.8 billion to Amazon’s kitty in 2012.

Visitors

This must come as no surprise that Amazon network sites (retail) get over 300 million unique visitors a month. Therefore Amazon sites generate over 3.6 billion unique visitors a year. 

Co-relate this data with the revenue generated by Amazon which is on average $5 billion/month for 2012 (estimate mentioned above) and we can figure out an average spend of $16.7 per unique visitor. 

NOTE: Because unique visitors are counted on a monthly basis, so the number of actual unique visitors counted over the entire year is very less than the number mentioned above. This is because a lot of repeat customers come to Amazon every month, and they are counted as a single unique visitor every month.

Which brings to attention an even bigger revelation: According to a 2011 article, the average customer spends about $245 on all Amazon sites every year, which has probably increased by 25% since Amazon’s revenue has also increased since 2011.

Estimate: The average customer spends about $306 every year on the Amazon network.

Although Amazon is one of the most trusted retail stores online, and has built a great reputation over the years, but still the numbers are staggering.

I would love to hear your opinions in the comments below, and I’ll soon be sharing some interesting marketing strategies deployed by Amazon that I’ve observed over the years.