On Wednesday, local time, Bezos published an annual letter to shareholders. In the letter, Bezos emphasized the importance of setting high standards when operating the business-by setting high standards, the company can meet the rising expectations of consumers in real time.
"How to face the rising customer expectations and always stay at the forefront? A single method can't work, it must be combined with multiple methods, but high standards must be an important part. "
Bezos said that it is very worthwhile to establish a high standard culture, which will bring many benefits. Regarding high standards, Bezos believes that they have four elements: "They are teachable and concrete, you must admit them, and you must clearly set expectations".
In addition, Bezos also shared some important achievements of last year in the shareholder letter:
Prime now has more than 654.38 billion Prime paid members worldwide; The average sales of Amazon's web services have reached $20 billion; Consumers have purchased tens of millions of Echo devices; Amazon Music has tens of millions of paying users. ...
Finally, Bezos said, "This year marks the 20th anniversary of the first shareholder letter, and our core values and methods have not changed. We have always been eager to be the best customer-centric company in the world, and we realize that this is not a small or easy challenge. We know that we can do better, and we have found great energy in many challenges and opportunities that we will face in the future. "
The following is the full text of Bezos' letter to shareholders
To our shareholders:
The American Customer Satisfaction Index recently released its annual survey results, and Amazon topped the list for the eighth year. There is a similar index in the UK, namely the UK Customer Satisfaction Index, which is provided by the Customer Service Center, and Amazon UK ranks first for the fifth time in a row. Amazon was also nominated by LinkedIn to enter the 20 18 list of the strongest companies, becoming the most sought-after workplace in the United States in the eyes of professionals. Just a few weeks ago, Harris poll released the annual reputation quotient, which surveyed more than 25,000 consumers on a wide range of topics, from working environment to social responsibility, products and services, and Amazon ranked first for the third consecutive year.
Congratulations and thanks to 560,000 Amazonians. Over the years, you have been working with infinite sincerity and creativity to customers every day, practicing the promise of excellent operation. At the same time, on behalf of Amazon people all over the world, I sincerely thank you, our customer. We are very pleased to see your response to these surveys.
One of the reasons I like customers is that they will never be satisfied. Their expectations are not fixed, but rising, which is in line with human nature. We didn't stop at the primitive hunting period, and the pursuit for better never stopped. Yesterday's "amazing" quickly became today's "normal". I see that the improvement cycle is shorter than ever before, which may be because customers can easily get more information than ever before-in just a few seconds or by pressing a few keys on their mobile phones, customers can read, comment, compare the prices of multiple retailers, check whether they have stock, know when to deliver goods or choose delivery methods, and so on. These examples come from the retail industry, but I think the same phenomenon of customer authorization also exists widely in Amazon and most other industries. In this world, you can't be content with the status quo, because customers don't allow such things to happen.
How to face the rising customer expectations and always stay at the forefront? A single method is not feasible, and many methods must be combined, but high standards must be an important part. In the past few years, we have made some achievements in meeting the high expectations of our customers, and at the same time, we have paid billions of dollars for failure. Against the background of these experiences, I would like to share with you some key points we have learned (so far) about high standards in the organization.
Intrinsic? Can you still teach?
First of all, there is a basic question: Is high standard inherent? Can you still teach? If you let me join your basketball team, you can teach me many things, but you can't teach me to grow taller. Do we need to choose "high standard" people first? If yes, this letter will mainly describe the recruitment work.
But I don't think so. I believe that high standards can be learned. In fact, it is easy for people to master high standards by listening and listening, and high standards are contagious. Bring new people into a high-standard team, and they will soon adapt, and vice versa. If low standards prevail, they will also spread rapidly.
Although personal contact is a good way to implement high standards, I believe you can speed up your study by clarifying some core principles of high standards, which is also the method I hope to share in this letter.
Almighty? Or specific?
Another important question is, are high standards universal? Or specific? In other words, if you implement high standards in one field, will other fields automatically reach high standards?
I believe that high standards are concrete, and you must learn high standards in each related field separately. When I founded Amazon, I set high standards in business development, customer care and employee recruitment, but I didn't set high standards in the operation process, including how to solve fixed problems, how to eradicate defects, how to check processes and so on. I have to study before I can set high standards in all these aspects (my colleagues are my mentors).
It is very important to understand this, because it keeps you humble. Generally speaking, you can consider yourself a person with high standards, but there are also some frustrating blind spots. Maybe in some ways you don't even know your own standards are low, or there are no standards at all, and of course you can't reach the world-class level. Therefore, it is very important to keep an open mind.
Identification and range
What kind of high standards need to be achieved in a specific field? First of all, you must be able to identify what is good and what is bad in that field. Second, your expectations must be realistic, and you should be aware of the difficulty (how much effort) of achieving your goals.
Let me give you two examples. One is the phenomenon of life, and the other is the real case that Amazon often appears.
Perfect handstand
A good friend of mine recently decided to learn to do beautiful handstands. I don't want to lean against the wall for more than a few seconds. I want to take a beautiful photo and post it on Instagram. She decided to start handstand in her yoga studio. She practiced for a while, and the effect was not good. So she hired a handstand coach.
In the first class, the coach gave her some good advice. "Many people think that if they practice hard, they should be able to master handstand skills in two weeks. The fact is, even if you practice every day, it still takes about half a year. If you think you can finish it in two weeks, be prepared to give up. "
Unrealistic expectations are always hidden in the heart and will stifle high standards. In order to achieve high standards, you or as a member of a team need to form and actively convey real ideas and tell everyone how difficult it is.
A six-page statement
In Amazon, we don't do PPT. Instead, we write a memo on six pages. We read silently at every meeting. These memos are very different. Some are as clear as angels singing. They are talented and thoughtful, which can make the meeting produce high-quality discussions, while others are just the opposite.
In the case of handstand, the establishment of high standards is clear at a glance. List the details of the action, and then, you either do it or you don't. Memos come in very different forms. It is easy to distinguish between first-class memos and ordinary memos, but it is very difficult to work out the detailed requirements of excellent memos. Many times, readers' reactions to first-class memos are very similar and can be seen at a glance. The standard is there, it is true, even if it is difficult to describe.
That's what we got. Usually, if a memo goes wrong, the reason is not that the author can't recognize the high standard, but that the expectation is wrong: they mistakenly think that a high-standard six-page memo can be written in a day or two or even a few hours, but it may actually take a week or more! They tried to complete a perfect handstand in two weeks, but we didn't train them in the right way. First-class memos need to be rewritten repeatedly. Together with colleagues who are asked to improve their work, they can set aside a few days to re-edit with different brains. It is impossible to finish them in a day or two. The point is that you can improve your grades through simple teaching actions-a first-class memo may take a week or more.
skill
Do you need skills besides identifying standards and having feasibility expectations? Do you have to be a very skilled writer to write a top memo? Do you need other elements?
I don't think so, at least for the individuals in the team. Football coaches don't need to play football, and film directors don't need to perform in person. But they all know what high standards are and tell others what practical expectations are. Even writing a six-page memo requires teamwork. Someone in the team has this ability, but it may not be you. (By the way, according to Amazon tradition, the author's name will never appear on the memo-the memo is the wisdom of the whole team. )
The benefits of high standards
It is worthwhile to establish a high standard culture, which can bring many benefits. The most natural and obvious thing is that you will provide customers with better products and services-this reason is enough! Perhaps less obviously, people will be attracted by high standards-which is conducive to recruiting and retaining employees. More subtly, a high-standard culture can protect the "intangible" but vital work carried out by each company. I'm talking about unsupervised work. Even if no one is watching, the work will be completed. In a high-standard culture, doing a good job itself is a reward-a part of professionalism.
Finally, high standards are interesting! Once you have tasted the sweetness of high standards, there is no turning back.
Therefore, we believe that high standards have four elements: they are teachable and concrete, you must admit them, and you must clearly set expectations. For us, these tasks mean paying attention to details at all levels. We hope they can also benefit you a lot.
Adhere to the highest standards
Leaders insist on high standards, which many people may think is unreasonable.
But the high standards promised by our leaders have benefited us a lot. Although I can't do handstands myself, I can share some important achievements that made us very proud last year, each of which is the crystallization of years of collective efforts. We never take these things for granted.
The most recent milestone:
Prime- After going online for 13 years, we now have more than1100,000 prime paying members all over the world. In 20 17, Amazon Prime sold more than 5 billion products worldwide. This year, the number of global Prime members and American Prime members has increased compared with previous years. We have expanded the Prime membership service to Mexico, Singapore, the Netherlands and Luxembourg, and launched the Business Prime shipping service in the United States and Germany. At the same time, we are still working hard to make Prime delivery faster. Today, more than 8,000 cities and towns can enjoy same-day delivery and same-day delivery services. Prime Now is supported by 50 cities in 9 countries around the world. Prime Member Day in 20 17 became the biggest global sales day in our history (until it was later surpassed by Digital Monday). On this day, more new members joined Prime than any other day in history.
AWS-The average sales of Amazon's web service has reached 20 billion dollars, and this business has been growing rapidly and healthily. The pace of innovation in AWS is also accelerating-especially in emerging fields such as machine learning, artificial intelligence, Internet of Things and serverless computing technology. In 20 17, AWS released more than 1400 excellent services and functions, including Amazon Sagemaker, which can help ordinary developers to build complex machine learning models more easily. We have thousands of customers using AWS's comprehensive machine learning service. Last year, the number of active users increased by more than 250%, among which Amazon SageMaker contributed a lot, and many new users began to accept this service. Last June,165438+1October, we held the sixth re:Invent conference. More than 40,000 people came to the scene and 60,000 people watched the live broadcast online.
Online retail business -20 17, worldwide, more than half of the goods sold on Amazon platform come from third-party sellers, which is the first time since the birth of Amazon. In 20 17, more than 300,000 small and medium-sized enterprises from the United States began to sell goods on Amazon platform, and Amazon sold the products of tens of billions of small and medium-sized enterprises all over the world. On the Prime Member Day of 20 17, consumers bought more than 40 million items on the Amazon platform. Compared with Prime Member Day on 20 16, the sales of SMB on that day increased by more than 60%. Our global sales projects increased by more than 50% in 20 17, and the cross-border e-commerce business of SMEs accounted for 25% of the total sales of all third parties.
Alexa- Consumers' enthusiasm for purchasing Alexa devices remains undiminished, and devices using Alexa Virtual Assistant are one of the best-selling products on Amazon platform. Currently, Alexa has more than 30,000 skills from external developers. Now consumers can use Alxea to control more than 4,000 smart home devices from 1200 independent brands. Alxea gets smarter every day. We have developed and deployed fingerprint technology on the device, so that the Alxea device in the user's home will not be awakened by mistake when playing Alexa advertisements on TV (this function ensures that Alexa advertisements we play during the Super Bowl will not wake up tens of millions of Alexas at the same time). Last year, the accuracy of Alexa's far-field speech recognition technology improved15%; In the United States, Britain and Germany, in the past 12 months, we used machine learning and semi-supervised learning technology to improve the oral comprehension ability of the equipment, and the accuracy rate increased by 25%. Finally, by using machine translation and transmission learning skills, we have significantly reduced the time required for Alexa to learn new sounds, which enables us to serve consumers in more countries, such as India and Japan.
Amazon device -20 17 is our best year of hardware sales ever. Consumers have purchased tens of millions of Echo devices, and Echo Dot and Fire TV TV stick are the best-selling products of all products on Amazon platform-including all product categories and manufacturers. In this year's holiday shopping season, consumers bought twice as many Fire TV sticks and children's Fire tablets as in the previous year. In 20 17, we released a brand-new Echo. The new equipment has a brand-new design, better sound quality and lower price. Echo Plus has a built-in smart home control center; There is also Echo Spot, which is small and portable and equipped with a dazzling prototype display. This year, we also released the latest generation of Fire TV, which has a 4K ultra-high definition display and supports high dynamic range images (HDR). There is also a Fire HD 10 tablet computer with 1080p full HD display. This year, the Kindle device celebrated its 10 birthday. To celebrate this milestone, we released a brand-new Kindle Oasis, which is the most advanced e-book reader we have launched so far. It uses a larger 7-inch display screen, which has a ppi of 300 and a built-in sound generator, so users can listen to audio books.
Prime video-Prime video continues to make important contributions to the growth and retention of Prime members. Last year, we improved Prime video to provide consumers with a better experience. We joined Prime Original's homemade dramas, such as The Great Lady Mercer, which won two critics' choice awards and two Golden Globes, and the Oscar-nominated film Seriously Ill.
Amazon Music-Amazon Music continued to develop rapidly in 20 17 years, and currently has tens of millions of paying users. Amazon Music Unlimited is our ad-free on-demand service. In 20 17, this service has entered more than 30 new countries, and the number of members has doubled in the past six months.
Fashion-Amazon has become a platform for tens of millions of consumers to buy fashion products. In 20 17, we launched the first fashion-oriented Prime product in the company's history: Prime wardrobe. This new service can move the fitting room directly to the home of Prime members, who can try on the latest fashion clothes directly before buying. We also cooperate with Nike and UGG to provide consumers with co-branded clothing from Drew Barrymore and Dwyane Wade, and we have also reached cooperation with other private brands, such as Goodthreads and Core 10. We also provide a platform for thousands of designers and artists to sell their designs and works on Amazon's Merch. At the end of 20 17, we launched an interactive shopping experience with Calvin Klein.
Whole Foods Supermarket-After we completed the acquisition of Whole Foods Supermarket last year, we announced that we would be committed to providing high-quality, pure natural organic food for everyone to buy. Then, we reduced the prices of some popular foods, including avocados, organic eggs and high-quality farmed salmon. Last June, 165438+ 10, we conducted the second round of price reduction. During Thanksgiving, our Prime members can buy turkeys at an exclusive discount. In February this year, we launched a two-hour delivery service in some cities, and Prime members can enjoy this service if their orders exceed $35. In the following March and April, we brought this service to other cities, and we plan to cover the whole country this year. We are currently solving some technical problems so that Whole Foods can identify consumers' Prime membership. After this technology is completed, Amazon Prime members who shop in Whole Foods Supermarket will get more benefits.
Amazon GO——Amazon GO is a brand-new physical store, and users don't have to queue up for checkout. We opened the first Amazon GO store in Seattle this year 1 month. Since opening, we are very happy to see that many consumers describe this shopping experience as a "magical experience". This kind of shopping experience depends on our self-developed computer vision technology, sensor fusion technology and deep learning technology. We combine these technologies to create this brand-new shopping experience. When shopping, consumers only need to walk into the store, take breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks or other groceries they need, and then walk out of the store. This kind of shopping is more convenient than any previous shopping method.
Treasure truck-Treasure truck has grown from a truck owned only in Seattle to 35 trucks, covering 25 cities in the United States and 0/2 cities in Britain/KLOC. Our trucks can blow bubbles and play music, and have delivered hundreds of thousands of orders to consumers, from steaks to Nestle's latest products. On 20 17, the treasure truck also reached cooperation with some local communities to help local people who lost their homes in communities affected by hurricanes.
India —— According to data from ——comScore and SimilarWeb, Amazon.in has become the fastest growing online shopping market in India, with the largest number of websites visited on mobile and PC. App Annie said that in 20 17, Amazon.in's mobile app became the most downloaded shopping app in India. After landing in India for the first year, the number of Prime members has grown faster than all other countries in Amazon's history. At present, India's Prime service covers more than 40 million kinds of local products from third-party sellers, and Prime Video is currently investing in large-scale homemade dramas in India.
Sustainable development-We have been working hard to reduce carbon emissions by optimizing transportation network, improving product packaging and strengthening energy efficiency in operation. We also have a long-term goal, which is to make our infrastructure in the world use 100% renewable energy. We recently built the Amazon wind farm in Texas, which is our largest wind farm to date. This power station has more than 100 turbine generators, which can generate 100 MWh every year. We plan to use solar energy systems in 50 fulfillment centers in 2020. So far, we have built 24 solar and wind energy projects in the United States, and 29 will be built in the future. At present, all renewable energy projects in Amazon generate enough electricity for more than 330,000 households every year. In 20 17, our fruitless packaging ushered in the birthday of 10. Fruitless packaging is our environmental protection packaging project. In the past 10 years, this project saved more than 244,000 tons of packaging materials. In addition, in just 20 17 a year, our project significantly reduced the waste of packaging materials and saved 305 million boxes. Globally, Amazon is signing a cooperation agreement with service providers to launch our first low-pollution last-mile delivery. So far, our transport fleet in Europe has been equipped with a large number of low-pollution electric vehicles and natural gas vehicles, and we still have more than 40 electric bicycles for urban distribution.
Help small and medium-sized enterprises-now there are tens of millions of small and medium-sized enterprises selling goods on Amazon platform, and they can meet new customers from all over the world on Amazon platform. These small and medium-sized enterprises not only come from all parts of the United States, but also from more than 30 countries around the world. In 20 17 years, among all small and medium-sized enterprises, the sales of140,000 in Amazon exceeded10,000 USD. More than 1000 independent authors earned more than $654.38+million through Kindle Direct Publishing in 20 17.
Investment and job creation-Since 20 1 1, we have invested more than15 billion dollars in global service network, transportation capacity and technical infrastructure (such as AWS data center). Amazon has created more than 654.38+70 million direct and insightful jobs around the world. In 20 17 years, we created more than130,000 Amazon direct jobs in the United States, excluding those obtained through acquisitions. Up to now, Amazon has 560,000 employees worldwide. Our newly created positions cover many fields, from artificial intelligence scientists to parcel professionals. In addition to these direct jobs, we estimate that Amazon's online market has created 900,000 jobs worldwide, and Amazon's investment has created an additional 260,000 jobs in the fields of construction, logistics and other professional services.
Career Choice-We have been very proud to provide employees with a career planning project: Amazon career choice. For hourly workers who have worked in Amazon for more than 65,438+0 years, we will pay 95% of tuition, miscellaneous fees and textbook fees in advance (up to $65,438+2,000), so that they can obtain employment certificates for high-demand occupations through study, such as aircraft maintenance, computer-aided design, machine tool technology, medical laboratory technology and nursing. Whether the skills these employees learn belong to the skills required by Amazon or not, we will provide them with financial assistance as long as the skills they choose to learn belong to high-demand skills. Since its launch in 20 12,16,000 employees (including 12,000 from the United States) have participated in this project. Commercial truck driving, medical care and information technology are the three most popular skills.
These milestones come from the contributions of many people. Amazon is inseparable from all 560,000 employees from all over the world, as well as 2 million sellers, hundreds of thousands of authors, millions of AWS developers and hundreds of millions of valuable consumers. These people are the driving force for us to make progress every day.
The road ahead.
This year marks the 20th anniversary of the first shareholder letter, and our core values and methods have not changed. We have always been eager to be the best customer-centric company in the world, and we realize that this is not a small or easy challenge. We know that we can do better, and we find great energy in many challenges and opportunities that we will face in the future.
Special thanks to every customer, we appreciate being able to serve you. Thank you for your support, the wisdom and passion of Amazon people all over the world, and your high standards.
As usual, the original letter 1997 is attached. The time is still 1 day (1 day).