Market cap

* For banks, enterprise value is substituted with market cap. Source: Bloomberg Finance L.P.

Performance of the brand

The e-commerce giant, Amazon, has had a year of growing revenue and falling profits, the latter item being widely regarded by analysts as insignificant in comparison to the growth of the company. Amazon, which has established itself as the world’s number one online retailer, sells more than three times as much as its nearest rivals. It has the widest range of products as well as the fastest delivery times and often charges the lowest price. The company initially only sold books, but its success soon led it to diversify into the many products it retails today with separate websites for all of its major country markets. It was able to grow very rapidly taking full advantage of being able to charge prices that excluded sales tax (within the USA) and other running costs that are associated with running a brick and mortar business.

Financial results of 2011 reflect Amazon’s growth with second quarter revenue increasing by 51% to $9.91 billion from the period a year earlier, whilst half year revenue increased 45% from 2010. Such large growth in revenue beat forecasters’ estimates and had a positive effect on the company’s brand value. In 2011, brand value increased 56.6% to $20.9 billion, compared to $13.3 billion in 2010. However, profit was down 8%, the fall was largely due to investments in a large number of new distribution centres as well as new technology – something which has become the focus of Amazon’s development in recent years.

Since its inception, the company has developed from a US online book retailer into the world’s largest online merchant, selling its own range of products, the most prominent of which is the Amazon Kindle e-book reader. The company recently reached a milestone by revealing that it now sells more e-books than real books. Continuing this trend, there has been a huge amount of excitement surrounding the long anticipated Amazon multimedia tablet which will serve as a platform for more of its products such as music, games and film. Much of the excitement comes from the fact that Amazon will be putting itself in direct competition with Apple’s iPad and other third party tablet devices. However, experts have argued that, unless Amazon is highly price competitive, it will be a very difficult market to break into with Apple being the more established, experienced and arguably stylish brand in providing digital media devices.

Nonetheless, it is a gripping period at Amazon; with brand value on the up and revenues at their all time high it doesn’t seem like the company will have any problems finding the cash to continue its investments in expansion.

League tables

Amazon.com appears in the following brand league tables:

Rank 2 in the Best Retail Brands 2012.
Rank 10 in the Global 500 2012.
Rank 32 in the Global 500 2011.
Rank 4 in the Best Retail Brands 2011.
Rank 32 in the Global 500 2011.
Rank 43 in the Global 500 2010.
Rank 79 in the Global 500 2009.
Rank 74 in the Global 500 2008.
Rank 136 in the Global 250 2007.