In a first-time disclosure, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos revealed that Prime has exceeded 100 million members globally. Thirteen years since its launch, in 2017, Amazon shipped more than five billion items with Prime worldwide, and more new members joined Prime than in any previous year – both worldwide and in the US, he said in a letter to Amazon’s shareholders.
This holds significance as this is reportedly the first time Bezos has shared any numbers regarding Prime.
In a letter that stressed on building a culture of high standards to be able to build better products and services for customers, Bezos shared some of the milestones achieved by the company globally.
Speaking of the Indian market specifically, Bezos cited comScore and SimilarWeb to claim that Amazon.in is the fastest growing marketplace in India and is the most visited site on both desktop and mobile.
“The Amazon.in mobile shopping app was also the most downloaded shopping app in India in 2017, according to App Annie,” he stated in the letter.
In fact, according to Bezos, Prime adoption has also been the fastest in India with more members subscribing to it in its first year than any previous geography in Amazon’s history. He further stated that Prime Video is investing in India original video content in a big way, including two recent premiers and over a dozen new shows in production. Currently, the selection includes over 40 million local products from third-party sellers.
Speaking of other milestones globally, Bezos stated that Amazon Web Services is currently a $20 billion revenue run rate business, with active users increasing more than 250 percent in the last year.
With Amazon aggressively pushing adoption of its AI-based assistant Alexa, Bezos says that Alexa-enabled devices are among the best-selling items across all of Amazon.
“There are now more than 30,000 skills for Alexa from outside developers, and customers can control more than 4,000 smart home devices from 1,200 unique brands with Alexa… Finally, we’ve dramatically reduced the amount of time required to teach Alexa new languages by using machine translation and transfer learning techniques, which allows us to serve customers in more countries (like India and Japan),” he said in the letter.
Amazon devices too have been seeing immense response with customers buying twice as many Fire TV Sticks and Kids Edition Fire Tablets this holiday season versus last year.
Amazon also claims to have created over 1.7 million direct and indirect jobs around the world. In 2017 alone, we directly created more than 130,000 new Amazon jobs, not including acquisitions, bringing our global employee base to over 560,000. “We estimate that Amazon Marketplace has created 900,000 more jobs worldwide, and that Amazon’s investments have created an additional 260,000 jobs in areas like construction, logistics, and other professional services,” Bezos wrote.
The letter to shareholders comes as a mark of its 20th anniversary. “We continue to aspire to be Earth’s most customer-centric company, and we recognize this to be no small or easy challenge. We know there is much we can do better, and we find tremendous energy in the many challenges and opportunities that lie ahead,” Bezos said towards the end of the letter.