Amazon Prime Now Has Over 200 Million Subscribers
- Paul Thurrott
- Apr 15, 2021
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Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos today delivered his 2020 letter to shareholders, spilling the beans on some new milestones. Among them, Amazon Prime now has over 200 million subscribers.
“In Amazon’s 1997 letter to shareholders, our first, I talked about our hope to create an ‘enduring franchise,’ one that would reinvent what it means to serve customers by unlocking the internet’s power,” he notes in the letter. “I noted that Amazon had grown from having 158 employees to 614, and that we had surpassed 1.5 million customer accounts. We had just gone public at a split-adjusted stock price of $1.50 per share. I wrote that it was Day 1. We’ve come a long way since then, and we are working harder than ever to serve and delight customers.”
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Among the new data provided by Bezos is:
Employees. Last year, Amazon hired 500,000 employees, and the firm now directly employ 1.3 million people around the world, he says. In 2020, employees earned $80 billion, plus another $11 billion in benefits and various payroll taxes, for a total of $91 billion, he adds.
Customers. Customers complete 28 percent of their purchases on Amazon in three minutes or less, and half of all purchases are finished in less than 15 minutes, Bezos says
Amazon Prime. There are now over 200 million Prime members worldwide. More
Retail partners. There are now over 1.9 million small and medium-sized businesses selling products through Amazn.com, and they make up almost 60 percent of its total retail sales. And in 2020, third-party profits from selling on Amazon were roughly $25 billion.
Alexa. Customers have connected over 100 million smart home devices to Alexa. I assume this number only includes third-party devices that are compatible with Alexa.
Amazon Web Services. AWS now serves “millions” of customers and ended 2020 with a $50 billion annualized run rate. (Which I think means an average of $12.5 billion in revenues per quarter.)
“In 1997, we hadn’t invented Prime, Marketplace, Alexa, or AWS,” he says. “They weren’t even ideas then, and none was preordained. We took great risk with each one and put sweat and ingenuity into each one.”