CBInsights-2018亚马逊战略解析报告（英文）-2018.12-64页.pdf.pdf

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1、1Amazon Strategy TeardownAMAZONS BARRELING INTO PHYSICAL RETAIL, FINANCIAL SERVICES, HEALTHCARE, AND AI-LED COMPUTING1Seattle-based Amazon is doubling down on AI for AWS and the ecosystem around its AI assistant, Alexa. Its seeking to become the central provider for AI-as-a-service. But its not leav

2、ing retail behind either, running grocery, book, and convenience stores across the US. Amazon is the exception to nearly every rule in business.Rising from humble beginnings as a Seattle-based internet bookstore, Amazon has grown into a propulsive force across at least 5 major industries: retail, lo

3、gistics, consumer technology, cloud computing, and most recently, media ” its a leader in consumer-facing AI and enterprise cloud services. And its insatiable appetite for new markets means competitors must always be on guard against its next moves.As the United States biggest online retailer, the c

4、ompany accounts for about 4% of all retail and about 44% of all e-com- merce spending in the US. While the company has been publicly traded for more than two decades, its market capitalization has swelled in recent years.2Wall Street banks like Morgan Stanley expect Amazon to continue growing at a r

5、ate that no company its size has ever done before, estimating 16% average compound growth in sales through 2025.Morgan Stanley analysts have also set a price target at $2,000/ share or a market capitalization exceeding $1T within the year. If Amazon is able to satisfy these lofty goals, it will be “

6、the most aggressive expansion of a giant company in the history of modern business.”Understanding the many-headed beast that is Amazon is no easy feat, especially because the company is so much less transparent than many its peers. As the New York Times reports,“Amazon isnt just secretive, the way A

7、pple is, but in a deeper sense, Jeff Bezos e-commerce and cloud-storage giant is opaque. Amazon rarely explains either its near-term tactical aims or its long-term strategic vision. It values surprise.”In this report, we dive into that “opaque” strategic vision, from Amazons investment and M its a v

8、ery common one. I almost never get the question: Whats not going to change in the next 10 years? And I submit to you 538that that second question is actually the more important of the two because you can build a business strategy around the things that are stable in time. In our retail business, we

9、know that customers want low prices, and I know thats going to be true 10 years from now. They want fast delivery; they want vast selection. Its impossible to imagine a future 10 years from now where a customer comes up and says, Jeff I love Amazon, I just wish the prices were a little higher; I lov

10、e Amazon, I just wish youd deliver a little more slowly. Impossible. And so the effort we put into those things, spinning those things up, we know the energy we put into it today will still be paying off dividends for our customers 10 years from now. When you have something that you know is true, ev

11、en over the long term, you can afford to put a lot of energy into it.”Always thinking about how to build tomorrow today, Amazon is investing in and improving its core business by developing new ones. In nearly all its main categories, Amazons position as a platform works in a data feedback loop.Amaz

12、on owns perhaps the richest dataset on how consumers consume, how sellers sell, and how developers develop. This, in turn, allows Amazon to optimize its online shopping experience, logistics network, developer environment, and even its voice AI, 39which in turn make Amazons offerings even richer.In

13、short, many of Amazons businesses follow the classic network effect flywheel. And, as well explore below, some of Amazons network effects are starting to collide.One theme that emerges in Amazons initiatives is the concept of diffusing internal tools as products. The company began as the sole seller

14、 on A, and eventually opened up its e-commerce platform (and logistics network) for 3rd parties to sell on. It opened up the computing infrastructure it spun up in-house and sold its computing and storage tools through the now-dominant AWS.Now, Amazon is in a position to do the same in cutting-edge

15、areas like machine learning, workerless retail tech, drone delivery, and voice computing. As these startup-dominated industries gain traction, Amazon may position itself as the necessary middleman for companies looking to succeed through online commerce benefiting from companies willing to pay the “

16、Amazon tax” that allows them to stay competitive.CORE BUSINESS IN COMMERCE the Amazon Go convenience store that uses machine vision to eliminate checkout lines; and Alexa our cloud-based AI assistant. (We still struggle to keep Echo in stock, despite our best efforts. A high-quality problem, but a p

17、roblem. Were working on it.) But much of what we do with machine learning happens beneath the surface. Machine learning drives our algorithms for demand forecasting, product search ranking, product and deals recommenda- tions, merchandising placements, fraud detection, translations, and much more. T

18、hough less visible, much of the impact of machine learning will be of this type quietly but meaningfully improving core operations. Inside AWS, were excited to lower the costs and barriers to machine learning and AI so organizations of all sizes can take advantage of these advanced techniques.“50Bez

19、os also mentions “quieter” machine learning and AI products working in the background. Amazon owes the development of Alexa hardware to Lab126 and many of its early recommendation algorithms to A9, both of which are secretive divisions in Silicon Valley. These bold bets on skunkworks teams have ende

20、d up paying off big, and the fruits of these labors are now front-and- center in Amazons computing strategy.Of course, as everything becomes more digitized, applying AI to more novel areas like healthcare could create new breakthroughs. Amazons investment in genomics startup GRAIL was a vote of conf

21、idence in the area, while outside of Amazon, healthcare is already one of the hottest areas for AI startups.With AWS being the go-to place for anything big data-related, Amazon is well-positioned to pivot once AI has its watershed moment. While AI is certainly heating up in the startup world, Bezos

22、words seem to suggest that AI could also be Amazons next pillar, up there with Prime and AWS.AWS & ENTERPRISE CLOUDAWS is now Amazons second-largest source of revenue, with nearly $17.5B in sales in 2017 and close to $4.5B in profit according to the companys recent 10K.51AWS began as a result of Ama

23、zon overhauling its own internal capacity for cloud services. Repurpose as a service for external clients, AWS allowed startups to migrate from expensive server hardware and software. Subsequently, Amazon AWS played no small part in the new wave of startups that flourished in the aftermath, includin

24、g present-day unicorns like Palantir and Slack.However, AWS relationship to the venture world started off as somewhat fraught. Amazon CTO Werner Vogels said that VCs initially loathed AWS because it “robbed them of the opportunity to get significant chunks of young businesses” by providing previousl

25、y unaffordable computer infrastructure. However, Vogels also noted that AWS has increasingly been accepted because it allows VCs to spread risk across a greater number of smaller startups. Nowadays, VCs often give away AWS gift certificates to their startups.As Brad Stone wrote, “It is not hyperbole

26、 to say that AWS, particu- larly the original services like S3 storage and EC2 VMs, helped lift the entire technology industry out of a prolonged dot-com malaise.” Stone also wrote that, more importantly, Amazon was also able to shake its own image as a simple e-commerce player and transform itself

27、into a big-league tech company:“Perhaps the greatest makeover was of Amazons own image. AWS enlarged the scope of what it meant to be the everything store and stocked Amazons shelves with incongruous products like spot instances and storage terabytes. It made Amazon a confusing target for 52Walmart

28、and other rival retailers and gave the company fresh appeal to the legions of engineers looking to solve the worlds most interesting problems. Finally, after years of setbacks and internal rancor, Amazon was unquestionably a technol- ogy company, what Bezos had always imagined it to be.”With cyberse

29、curity heating up as a startup category, its no surprise that AWS wants to beef up its cybersecurity offerings. As indicated by its patents and acquisitions, Amazon is very focused on improving and securing the stack.In the fall of 2016, AWS suffered DDoS attacks, causing many websites across the in

30、ternet to be affected due to AWS status as the go-to solution for corporate computing. It soon released AWS Shield, a product intended to protect applications running on AWS.More recently, however, Teslas AWS servers were breached by cryptominers using the misconfigured AWS servers to earn cryptocur

31、rency free of charge. This in mind, it wouldnt be sur- prising to see more cybersecurity M&A, such as Amazons recent acquisitions of Sqrrl and Harvest.ai, to continue the companys efforts to strengthen its offerings.AWS likely got a head start due to classic Innovators Dilemma nearsightedness, where

32、 many of its competitors didnt see infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) as a threat. Now that AWS has reached a critical mass, the strategy going forward will likely be centered on making code deployment even more seamless.Well also likely see more “as-a-service” offerings that make deployment flexibl

33、e and dead simple. One example in this arena is AWS Lambdas serverless computing, which easily runs a snippet of code upon request, so developers dont need to consider provisioning or managing servers. (In essence, this is the micro-service version of EC2, but EC2 is still a full server that has to

34、be managed think Airbnb as opposed to renting an apartment.) With Lambda, developers can quickly go live in a way that was previously cost and time-prohibitive, using fast, one-time bits of code.53In addition, AWS now offers per-second billing for EC2 Instances, further reducing costs of organizatio

35、ns that used to pay per min- ute. This strategy seemed so effective that Google followed suit just a week later, offering more services within the per-second model. To ward off competitors, AWS will need to offer more services like Lambda, along with its AI and voice APIs, at cheaper costs to attrac

36、t and empower smaller coders.MEDIA & ADVERTISINGAmazon upended the bookselling industry years back with features like “Look Inside,” and later brought books into the digital era with its Kindle e-readers, another product of Amazons R&D arm Lab126. Its acquisition of Audible continues to supply audio

37、books, which is currently the fastest-growing format in publishing. Back in its infancy, Amazon would throw its weight around the publishing world by threatening to lower the store rankings of publishers who didnt meet their digitization demands.Now, the e-commerce giant has expanded far beyond book

38、s when it comes to its media and entertainment offerings.To bolster its Prime subscriptions which represent Amazons third-largest source of revenue, after e-commerce and Marketplace Amazon has introduced another special benefit to membership: Prime Video streaming.Bezos has publicly explained the fl

39、ywheel effect of Prime Video. With a suite of premium streaming, users are more likely to renew their (decently large ticket) Prime memberships, and are also inclined to buy more, which, in turn, makes for more Prime memberships and e-commerce sales.“Amazon Studios is making original content for Pri

40、me Videofrom a business point of view for us, we get to monetize this content in an unusual way. Winning a Golden Globe helps us sell more shoes and it does that in a very direct way. If you look at Prime members, they buy more on Amazon than non-Prime 54members. One of the reasons they do that is b

41、ecause theyve paid their annual fee, theyre looking around to see how to get more value out of the program. They look across more categories Weve monitored that Prime Video customers renew Prime at higher rates, and they convert from free trials at higher rates.”Interestingly, Bezos also said that h

42、e doesnt see Netflix as a competitor, arguing that Amazon doesnt necessarily compete head- to-head with Netflix on the demand side: “When it comes to these over-the-top subscriptions, I think people are going to subscribe to Netflix, and Prime Video, and Hulu, and HBO, and so on.”But similar to Netf

43、lix, Amazon has moved beyond simply distrib- uting content. Amazon Studios produced movies that racked up three Academy Award wins at the 2017 Oscars: “Manchester By the Sea” won Best Actor and Best Original Screenplay, and “The Salesman” won best Foreign Film. (Thats two more Oscars than Netflix, w

44、hich won for a short-subject documentary.)Amazons interest in content could further transform the entertainment industry: Amazon spent an estimated $4.5B on content in 2017 twice HBOs budget. But thats still trailing Netflixs aggressive $6B budget for 2017 content, which is double what Netflix spent

45、 in 2016.55Last year, Amazon also streamed Thursday Night Football as part of a $50M contract with the NFL. It wouldnt be surprising to see Amazon renew this contract, or enter new agreements with additional professional sports organizations for streaming rights in the future.Beyond video streaming

46、entertainment, Amazon is also making strides in the gaming space.As interest in e-sports (competitive video-gaming) continues to rise, Twitch, the video game broadcast site Amazon bought for just shy of a billion dollars, has grown to become one of the largest bandwidth users in the US, boasting mor

47、e than 15 million daily active users.The company has attracted YouTube gaming stars and pop culture celebrities. The platform also now sells video games directly on the site, an expansion that competes with the game marketplace world of Steam and Valve. Twitch membership is free with Prime, making j

48、oining Amazon attractive to gamers who are already well accustomed to buying their gaming titles online.With its unique incentive to sell more subscriptions by offering more content and services, Amazon is able to offer a premium media suite at a cost its competitors cannot compete with.Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures recently expressed concerns that Amazon has an unfair advantage in its ability to bundle content with other Prime services:56“I worry Amazon has an almost unfair advantage in the content business because of Prime. Its the craziest thing ever. Who