100 million Prime subscribers for Amazon

Ecommerce giant Amazon surpassed the 100 million Prime subscriber mark, just one of the many milestones CEO Jeff Bezos mentioned in his annual shareholder briefing.

Excellent 2017

It is the first time in Prime’s thirteen years that Amazon has divulged actual results and it turns out to be a resounding success: it passed 100 million subscribers in 2017 and sold more than 5 billion items through Prime, Bezos writes. Prime is a subscription that provides speedy and free home deliveries for millions of products in exchange for a few dollars per month. The service launched in 2005 in the United States, but is now also available in Great Britain, India, Germany, China and the Benelux (the latter since November).

As usual, Bezos also looked back on the past year’s achievements. For the first time ever, more than half of the products bought on Amazon came from third parties: more than 300,000 SMEs are on Amazon’s marketplace in the United States alone.

2017 was also the best year ever for Amazon’s own hardware (like Echo, Echo Dot, Fire TV Stick and Alexia) and Amazon Web Services’ turnover surpassed 20 billion dollars for the first time. On-demand service Amazon Music Unlimited doubled its subscriber base in the past six months, helped by a launch in another thirty countries. That is not the end of the achievements Bezos listed in his brief.

“This year marks the 20th anniversary of our first shareholder letter, and our core values and approach remain unchanged. 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.” In short, Jeff Bezos has no plans to take things slowly anytime soon…