Management

Read the case study “Amazon.com’s Business Model,” found in Part 2 of your textbook.

Review the “Guide to Case Analysis” found on pp. CA1 – CA11 of your textbook. (This guide follows the last case in the textbook.)

Use the Case Study Format as described in the “Guide to Case Analysis” to complete a written case analysis for “Amazon.com’s Business Model.” Ensure your case analysis is in APA format.

Your case analysis should include the following:

A case analysis overview, including the company’s current situation, most recent strategies, and significant problems/issues confronting management.
The results of your Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (SWOT) analysis of the company.
The results of your financial analysis of the company, using at least three relevant Key Financial Ratios from Table 1in the “Guide to Case Analysis.”
A detailed description of your recommended strategic changes that address the problems/issues you identified above.
A well-developed action plan for how the company should implement your strategic changes.

ANSWER

Amazon is a multinational company bases in Seattle, Washington, United States that engages in e-commerce, digital streaming, cloud computing and artificial intelligence. The entire business strategy relies largely on the ability to achieve competitive advantage through overall cost leadership and product definition (Rikap 2020). The focus in artificial intelligence and other digital technologies like Big Data and Machine Learning is aimed at the achievement of economies of scale. Additionally, the company employs a strong convenience strategy to their customers where orders are all online and deliveries are almost instant. The company is currently considering delivery metrics that make use of autonomous drones (Mok 2020).

However, even with the company being in the global leader of electronic commerce, keeping up with the changes in culture, technology and human societies has proven to be a challenge. A good example is a recent data privacy concern from countries in the European Union, Australia and the United States. The concept is fairly new and only until recently was it legislated even though the limits of privacy have hardly been understood. Secondly, the company experiences stiff competition from companies such as Walmart. Walmart still has a large customer base owing to its traditional methods that are still appreciated today. In the 2020 December report, Edgewater Research Daryl Boehringer observed that Walmart was Amazon’s largest competitor (Akgün 2020).

Owing to the issues addressed above, Amazon would best apply more research in digital technologies that use AI and Machine Learning to stay ahead of the competition. For instance, the drone research could revolutionise the ordering and delivering of goods and change the culture forever. Like in most digital companies, the secret lies in being at the cutting edge of technology.

References

Akgün, U., & Latham, O. (2020). Loss of potential competition through a minority stake? Takeaways from Amazon/Deliveroo. Competition Law Journal, 19(4), 196-200.

Mok, W. Y. (2020, December). A Feasible Schema Design Strategy for Amazon DynamoDB: A Nested Normal Form Approach. In 2020 IEEE International Conference on Industrial Engineering and Engineering Management (IEEM) (pp. 903-907). IEEE.

Rikap, C. (2020). Amazon: A story of accumulation through intellectual rentiership and predation. Competition & Change, 1024529420932418.