Headquartered in Seattle, Washington, Amazon.com is an American electronic commerce and cloud computing company. It was founded by Jeff Bezos in 1994 and later went online by 1995. With humble beginnings as an online bookstore, and then moving onto selling music, videos and producing their own consumer electronics, Amazon.com has become the largest Internet-based Retailer in the United States. The 2014 Annual Report starts off by with a message from the CEO, Jeff Bezos. He initially starts off with the history of how Amazon.com started after which he talks about the different products and services that Amazon.com offers like Amazon Prime and Amazon Web Services. What I found most interesting in his letter was about the Career Choice Program that he had mentioned in which Amazon.com pre-pays 95% of tuition for employees to take courses for in-demand fields. It was great to see that Amazon.com provided opportunities to make a career change and they felt that they were only a stepping stone in someone's career path.
The CEO's message was followed by his 1997 letter to the shareholders to show that they still believed in the same values and goals as that of 1997 even now. This was followed by the Form 10-K from the United States Securities and Exchange Commission. The Annual Report is divided into 4 parts.
The first part talks about a general overview of the company, their consumers, sellers, enterprises, content creators, competition, intellectual property, seasonality and their employees. It also lists down the executive officers of the Registrant and also the Board of Directors. It mentions the various risk factors that affect the company's functioning like the intense competition, expansion into new products and services, risks involved with international exposure, seasonality of their business places, risks involved in various merger and acquisitions, security breaches, foreign exchange risks and also loss of key personnel.