Amazon at 30: What next for 'The Everything Company'?

Amazon, the giant company that started 30 years ago, is now a massive entity that is hard to fully comprehend. Imagine a vast warehouse in Dartford, on the outskirts of London, filled with millions of items. Hundreds of thousands of these items are bought every day, and it takes just two hours from the moment something is ordered for it to be picked, packed, and sent on its way. Now, picture that scene and multiply it by 175. That is the number of 'fulfilment centres' Amazon has around the world. But that is just a fraction of what Amazon does. It is also a major player in streaming and media (Amazon Prime Video), home camera systems (Ring), smart speakers (Alexa), tablets and e-readers (Kindle), and it supports vast parts of the internet (Amazon Web Services). 'For a long time, it has been called 'The Everything Store', but now Amazon is more like 'The Everything Company',' says Amanda Mull from Bloomberg. 'It is so large and omnipresent and touches so many different parts of life that people take Amazon's presence in daily life for granted,' she says. Or, as someone else put it, the only way to avoid Amazon is by 'living in a cave'.

Amazon has used sports to grow its streaming business. The Amazon logo is seen at a Premier League football match. Since Jeff Bezos founded Amazon in 1994, it has grown explosively and continually reinvented itself. There has been plenty of criticism along the way too. But the main question now is: once you are 'The Everything Company', what do you do next? Sucharita Kodali, who analyzes Amazon for Forrester, asks, 'What is left? ' 'Once you are making half a trillion dollars in revenue, how do you keep growing at double digits every year? ' One option is to connect its existing businesses. The vast amounts of shopping data from Prime members might help sell ads on its streaming service. But that only goes so far. What benefits can Kuiper, its satellite division, bring to Whole Foods, its supermarket chain?

To some extent, says Sucharita Kodali, the answer is to keep trying new business ventures and not worry if they fail. Just this week, Amazon shut down a project after only nine months. Ms Kodali says it is just one of many bad ideas the company tried and discarded to find successful ones. But Amazon may also have to focus on something else: the increasing attention of regulators. They are asking tough questions like what does it do with our data, what is its environmental impact, and is it too big? These issues could lead to intervention, like how monopolies were rolled back in the early 20th century, says Ms Kodali. For Juozas Kaziukėnas, founder of Marketplace Pulse, its size poses another problem: the places its Western customers live in cannot take much more stuff. 'Our cities were not built for many more deliveries,' he tells the BBC. That makes emerging economies like India, Mexico, and Brazil important. But, Mr Kaziukėnas suggests, there Amazon does not just need to enter the market but to some extent to create it. 'It's crazy and maybe should not be the case - but that's a conversation for another day,' he says.

Amanda Mull points to another priority for Amazon in the years ahead: staving off competition from Chinese rivals like Temu and Shein. Amazon, she says, has 'created the spending habits' of Western consumers by acting as a trusted intermediary between them and Chinese manufacturers, and bolting on easy returns and lightning-fast delivery. But remove that last element of the deal and you can bring prices down, as the Chinese retailers have done. 'They have said 'well, if you wait a week or 10 days for something that you're just buying on a whim, we can give it to you for almost nothing,'' says Ms Mull - a proposition that is appealing to many people, especially during a cost of living crisis. Juozas Kaziukėnas is not so sure - suggesting the new retailers will remain 'niche', and it will take something much more fundamental to challenge Amazon's position. 'For as long as going shopping involves going to a search bar - Amazon has nailed that,' he says. Thirty years ago, a fledgling company spotted emerging trends around internet use and realized how it could upend first retail, then much else besides. Mr Kaziukėnas says for that to happen again will take a similar leap of imagination, perhaps around AI. 'The only threat to Amazon is something that doesn't look like Amazon,' he says.