Amazon.com Inc

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What it is

Amazon started in 1994 as an online bookstore, then grew into one of the world’s largest retail platforms, a dominant cloud-computing provider through AWS, a video streamer, and a logistics empire that reaches across continents.

In its 2025 fiscal year, revenue grew 12% to $717 billion; the North America retail arm was up 10%, the international arm up 13%, and AWS — the cloud division — up 20%. The business runs on three engines: selling goods to shoppers, renting computing power to businesses, and selling advertising — a combination almost no competitor can replicate at this scale.

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Who owns it

The largest single shareholder is founder Jeff Bezos, who stepped down as CEO in 2021 and now serves as executive chairman; as of mid-2025 he owned roughly 884 million shares, a stake of just over 8%. That stake has been falling — Bezos sold more than 100 million shares over the past year, yet it still represents a controlling cultural and financial presence.

Institutional investors — pension funds, index funds, and asset managers — hold about 64% of shares, while retail investors hold the remaining roughly 28%. The biggest institutional holders include Vanguard and BlackRock.

There is no second controlling family or state shareholder; this is a widely held public company with one dominant individual founder.

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Who runs it

Andy Jassy has been president and CEO since July 2021, when he succeeded Jeff Bezos. Jassy built and ran AWS before taking the top job, and has since worked to streamline costs while deepening investment in selected growth areas.

Brian Olsavsky has been Senior Vice President and CFO since 2015, overseeing tax, treasury, investor relations, and global real estate. Under his watch, annual revenue grew from just over $100 billion in 2015 to $717 billion in 2025.

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The money, in plain words

Amazon keeps about 10.8 cents of profit from every dollar of sales — a net profit margin of 10.8% (our calculation) — up sharply from 5.3% just two years earlier in FY2023. For every dollar of owners’ equity in the business, it earns back roughly 24 cents a year — a return on equity of 24.3%, which is strong for a company at this scale.

Investors are paying a premium to own the stock: at 32.7 times earnings (price-to-earnings ratio of 32.7×), they are betting that profits keep growing fast. Revenue has compounded at roughly 12% a year recently, and the balance sheet holds $86.8 billion in cash against no disclosed long-term debt in the most recent annual figures (our calculation) — a fortress position that funds the capital it needs to build data centres and logistics networks.

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What it is doing now

In the most recent quarter — Q1 2026 — total sales rose 17% to $181.5 billion, with AWS alone growing 28% to $37.6 billion. That 28% rate was AWS’s fastest quarterly growth in nearly four years.

Amazon has committed up to $100 billion in capital expenditure for 2025, the majority earmarked for AI-related projects, including its own custom chips and a growing family of AI models sold through AWS. First-quarter 2026 net income also included a $16.8 billion pre-tax gain on the company’s investment in AI start-up Anthropic, signalling that Amazon is building stakes in the AI ecosystem beyond just selling computing power.

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What to watch

• AWS margin discipline: AWS generated $14.2 billion in operating profit in Q1 2026 — more than the whole North American retail operation — but the $100 billion-plus capex cycle means that profit could compress before it expands again.
• Bezos selling: The founder has been reducing his stake steadily, from 10.1% a year ago to roughly 9%; continued sales are a watch item for sentiment, even if they do not affect day-to-day control.
• Advertising as a third engine: Amazon’s advertising business generated $17.2 billion in Q1 revenue alone, growing 22% year over year — high-margin dollars that are still underappreciated relative to the retail headline.
• AI competition: AWS leads the cloud infrastructure market but faces mounting competition from Microsoft and Google, all investing heavily for the AI era.

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This is news, not investment advice.