5 Surprising Facts About Amazon

Amazon’s market value has exceeded $1 trillion in 2018, making it the second US company after Apple to enter the territory. According to CNN Money, Amazon and Apple make up more than 8% of the total value of the S&P 500. If you are wondering how Amazon, which is mostly known as an e-commerce website, could have achieved this, you may be surprised to know that its reach extends far beyond e-commerce.

1. Amazon is planning to enter the streaming market for video game play, competing with Google and Microsoft that are already in the space. The reported service would be based on Amazon’s gigantic cloud network and users will be able to stream the video games on their smartphone without needing to own a gaming console or a computer to run it.
2. Amazon has been quietly expanding its ocean shipping service, sending close to 4.7 million cartons of consumers goods from China to the United States over the past year. This means that Amazon offers companies with manufacturing bases in China the option of beginning-to-end shipping and is therefore in control of the whole transaction cycle.
3. You may already know that Amazon has been taking its first steps into the healthcare industry and that in 2018, it bought an internet pharmacy called PillPack. Amazon went also into a joint venture with J.P. Morgan and Berkshire Hathaway aiming at lowering the cost of healthcare for employees. Industry experts suggest that all the above are indications that Amazon may get into health insurance in 2019. It is generally expected that Amazon would test with its own employees first before it approached other large employers.
4. Further disrupting the healthcare industry, Amazon has been reported to secretly run an internal lab dedicated to developing healthcare technology and last year partnered with the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle to explore how the use of machine learning could prevent or cure cancer.
5. Amazon has also its fair share in the hardware industry, media, retail, web services and renewable energy. Additionally, the Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos owns numerous businesses outside of Amazon such as the Washington Post and Bezos Expeditions, a company managing his venture capital investments.

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Information sources: CNBC, Investopedia, Yahoo Finance, The Washington Post, CNN Money

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