致我们的股东：在亚马逊“1997年的第一封致股东信”中，我谈到希望建立“持久特许经营权”一事，也就是通过释放互联网的力量来重新定义“服务客户”的意义。我当时提到，亚马逊已经从158名员工发展至614名员工，我们的用户账户也超过了150万。我们刚刚上市，经拆股调整后的股价为每股1.5美元。我写道：那是第一天。自那时以来，我们走过了一段很长的路，我们也比以往任何时候都更加努力地服务用户。去年，我们雇佣了50万名员工，现在全球范围内的员工总数达到130万。我们在全球拥有超过2亿的Prime会员。超过190万中小企业在亚马逊上进行销售，占我们销售总额的近60%。用户已经将超过1亿台智能家居设备与Alexa相连接。云服务（Amazon Web Services, AWS）为数百万客户服务，截至2020年，年营收运转率达到500亿美元。在1997年，我们还没有发明Prime、Marketplace、Alexa或是AWS。根本没人想过这些，它们的诞生也并非命中注定之事。为了每一件产品，我们都冒了很大的风险，也付出了很多智慧与汗水。一路走来，我们为股东创造了1.6万亿美元的财富。他们是谁？当然，我所持有的亚马逊股份使我变得富有。但超过7/8的股份，也就相当于1.4万亿美元的财富，为他人所有。他们是谁？是养老基金、大学、401（K）退休福利计划，也是Mary和拉里，他们在我坐下来写这封股东信的时候，意外地给我发来了以下这封信：
To our shareowners:In Amazon’s 1997 letter to shareholders, our first, I talked about our hope to create an “enduring franchise,”
one that would reinvent what it means to serve customers by unlocking the internet’s power. I noted that
Amazon had grown from having 158 employees to 614, and that we had surpassed 1.5 million customer
accounts. We had just gone public at a split-adjusted stock price of $1.50 per share. I wrote that it was Day 1. We’ve come a long way since then, and we are working harder than ever to serve and delight customers.
Last year, we hired 500,000 employees and now directly employ 1.3 million people around the world. We have
more than 200 million Prime members worldwide. More than 1.9 million small and medium-sized businesses
sell in our store, and they make up close to 60% of our retail sales. Customers have connected more than
100 million smart home devices to Alexa. Amazon Web Services serves millions of customers and ended 2020
with a $50 billion annualized run rate. In 1997, we hadn’t invented Prime, Marketplace, Alexa, or AWS.
They weren’t even ideas then, and none was preordained. We took great risk with each one and put sweat
and ingenuity into each one. Along the way, we’ve created $1.6 trillion of wealth for shareowners. Who are they? Your Chair is one, and
my Amazon shares have made me wealthy. But more than 7/8ths of the shares, representing $1.4 trillion of
wealth creation, are owned by others. Who are they? They’re pension funds, universities, and 401(k)s, and
they’re Mary and Larry, who sent me this note out of the blue just as I was sitting down to write this
shareholder letter:
I am approached with similar stories all the time. I know people who’ve used their Amazon money for
college, for emergencies, for houses, for vacations, to start their own business, for charity – and the list goes
on. I’m proud of the wealth we’ve created for shareowners. It’s significant, and it improves their lives. But I
also know something else: it’s not the largest part of the value we’ve created. Create More Than You Consume If you want to be successful in business (in life, actually), you have to create more than you consume. Your
goal should be to create value for everyone you interact with. Any business that doesn’t create value for those
it touches, even if it appears successful on the surface, isn’t long for this world. It’s on the way out. Remember that stock prices are not about the past. They are a prediction of future cash flows discounted
back to the present. The stock market anticipates. I’m going to switch gears for a moment and talk about the
past. How much value did we create for shareowners in 2020? This is a relatively easy question to answer
because accounting systems are set up to answer it. Our net income in 2020 was $21.3 billion. If, instead of
being a publicly traded company with thousands of owners, Amazon were a sole proprietorship with a single
owner, that’s how much the owner would have earned in 2020. How about employees? This is also a reasonably easy value creation question to answer because we can look
at compensation expense. What is an expense for a company is income for employees. In 2020, employees
earned $80 billion, plus another $11 billion to include benefits and various payroll taxes, for a total of
$91 billion. How about third-party sellers? We have an internal team (the Selling Partner Services team) that works to
answer that question. They estimate that, in 2020, third-party seller profits from selling on Amazon were
between $25 billion and $39 billion, and to be conservative here I’ll go with $25 billion. For customers, we have to break it down into consumer customers and AWS customers. We’ll do consumers first. We offer low prices, vast selection, and fast delivery, but imagine we ignore all of
that for the purpose of this estimate and value only one thing: we save customers time. Customers complete 28% of purchases on Amazon in three minutes or less, and half of all purchases are
finished in less than 15 minutes. Compare that to the typical shopping trip to a physical store – driving,
parking, searching store aisles, waiting in the checkout line, finding your car, and driving home. Research
suggests the typical physical store trip takes about an hour. If you assume that a typical Amazon purchase
takes 15 minutes and that it saves you a couple of trips to a physical store a week, that’s more than 75
hours a year saved. That’s important. We’re all busy in the early 21st century. So that we can get a dollar figure, let’s value the time savings at $10 per hour, which is conservative. Seventyfive hours multiplied by $10 an hour and subtracting the cost of Prime gives you value creation for each
Prime member of about $630. We have 200 million Prime members, for a total in 2020 of $126 billion of value
creation. AWS is challenging to estimate because each customer’s workload is so different, but we’ll do it anyway,
acknowledging up front that the error bars are high. Direct cost improvements from operating in the cloud
versus on premises vary, but a reasonable estimate is 30%. Across AWS’s entire 2020 revenue of $45 billion,
that 30% would imply customer value creation of $19 billion (what would have cost them $64 billion on
their own cost $45 billion from AWS). The difficult part of this estimation exercise is that the direct cost
reduction is the smallest portion of the customer benefit of moving to the cloud. The bigger benefit is the
increased speed of software development – something that can significantly improve the customer’s
competitiveness and top line. We have no reasonable way of estimating that portion of customer value
except to say that it’s almost certainly larger than the direct cost savings. To be conservative here (and
remembering we’re really only trying to get ballpark estimates), I’ll say it’s the same and call AWS customer
value creation $38 billion in 2020. Adding AWS and consumer together gives us total customer value creation in 2020 of $164 billion.
Summarizing: Shareholders $21B Employees $91B
3P Sellers $25B Customers $164B Total $301B If each group had an income statement representing their interactions with Amazon, the numbers above
would be the “bottom lines” from those income statements. These numbers are part of the reason why people
work for us, why sellers sell through us, and why customers buy from us. We create value for them. And
this value creation is not a zero-sum game. It is not just moving money from one pocket to another. Draw
the box big around all of society, and you’ll find that invention is the root of all real value creation. And value
created is best thought of as a metric for innovation. Of course, our relationship with these constituencies and the value we create isn’t exclusively dollars and
cents. Money doesn’t tell the whole story. Our relationship with shareholders, for example, is relatively simple.
They invest and hold shares for a duration of their choosing. We provide direction to shareowners
infrequently on matters such as annual meetings and the right process to vote their shares. And even then
they can ignore those directions and just skip voting. Our relationship with employees is a very different example. We have processes they follow and standards
they meet. We require training and various certifications. Employees have to show up at appointed times. Our
interactions with employees are many, and they’re fine-grained. It’s not just about the pay and the benefits.
It’s about all the other detailed aspects of the relationship too. Does your Chair take comfort in the outcome of the recent union vote in Bessemer? No, he doesn’t. I think
we need to do a better job for our employees. While the voting results were lopsided and our direct
relationship with employees is strong, it’s clear to me that we need a better vision for how we create value for
employees – a vision for their success. If you read some of the news reports, you might think we have no care for employees. In those reports, our
employees are sometimes accused of being desperate souls and treated as robots. That’s not accurate. They’re
sophisticated and thoughtful people who have options for where to work. When we survey fulfillment
center employees, 94% say they would recommend Amazon to a friend as a place to work. Employees are able to take informal breaks throughout their shifts to stretch, get water, use the rest room,
or talk to a manager, all without impacting their performance. These informal work breaks are in addition to
the 30-minute lunch and 30-minute break built into their normal schedule. We don’t set unreasonable performance goals. We set achievable performance goals that take into account
tenure and actual employee performance data. Performance is evaluated over a long period of time as we
know that a variety of things can impact performance in any given week, day, or hour. If employees are on
track to miss a performance target over a period of time, their manager talks with them and provides
coaching. Coaching is also extended to employees who are excelling and in line for increased responsibilities. In fact,
82% of coaching is positive, provided to employees who are meeting or exceeding expectations. We terminate
the employment of less than 2.6% of employees due to their inability to perform their jobs (and that
number was even lower in 2020 because of operational impacts of COVID-19). Earth’s Best Employer and Earth’s Safest Place to Work The fact is, the large team of thousands of people who lead operations at Amazon have always cared deeply
for our hourly employees, and we’re proud of the work environment we’ve created. We’re also proud of the
fact that Amazon is a company that does more than just create jobs for computer scientists and people with
advanced degrees. We create jobs for people who never got that advantage. Despite what we’ve accomplished, it’s clear to me that we need a better vision for our employees’ success.
We have always wanted to be Earth’s Most Customer-Centric Company. We won’t change that. It’s what got
us here. But I am committing us to an addition. We are going to be Earth’s Best Employer and Earth’s
Safest Place to Work. In my upcoming role as Executive Chair, I’m going to focus on new initiatives. I’m an inventor. It’s what I
enjoy the most and what I do best. It’s where I create the most value. I’m excited to work alongside the large
team of passionate people we have in Ops and help invent in this arena of Earth’s Best Employer and
Earth’s Safest Place to Work. On the details, we at Amazon are always flexible, but on matters of vision we
are stubborn and relentless. We have never failed when we set our minds to something, and we’re not going to
fail at this either. We dive deep into safety issues. For example, about 40% of work-related injuries at Amazon are related to
musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs), things like sprains or strains that can be caused by repetitive motions.
MSDs are common in the type of work that we do and are more likely to occur during an employee’s first
six months. We need to invent solutions to reduce MSDs for new employees, many of whom might be
working in a physical role for the first time. One such program is WorkingWell – which we launched to 859,000 employees at 350 sites across North
America and Europe in 2020 – where we coach small groups of employees on body mechanics, proactive
wellness, and safety. In addition to reducing workplace injuries, these concepts have a positive impact on
regular day-to-day activities outside work. We’re developing new automated staffing schedules that use sophisticated algorithms to rotate employees
among jobs that use different muscle-tendon groups to decrease repetitive motion and help protect employees
from MSD risks. This new technology is central to a job rotation program that we’re rolling out throughout
2021. Our increased attention to early MSD prevention is already achieving results. From 2019 to 2020, overall
MSDs decreased by 32%, and MSDs resulting in time away from work decreased by more than half. We employ 6,200 safety professionals at Amazon. They use the science of safety to solve complex problems
and establish new industry best practices. In 2021, we’ll invest more than $300 million into safety projects,
including an initial $66 million to create technology that will help prevent collisions of forklifts and other
types of industrial vehicles. When we lead, others follow. Two and a half years ago, when we set a $15 minimum wage for our hourly
employees, we did so because we wanted to lead on wages – not just run with the pack – and because we
believed it was the right thing to do. A recent paper by economists at the University of California-Berkeley
and Brandeis University analyzed the impact of our decision to raise our minimum starting pay to $15 per
hour. Their assessment reflects what we’ve heard from employees, their families, and the communities they
live in. Our increase in starting wage boosted local economies across the country by benefiting not only our own
employees but also other workers in the same community. The study showed that our pay raise resulted in a
4.7% increase in the average hourly wage among other employers in the same labor market. And we’re not done leading. If we want to be Earth’s Best Employer, we shouldn’t settle for 94% of
employees saying they would recommend Amazon to a friend as a place to work. We have to aim for 100%.
And we’ll do that by continuing to lead on wages, on benefits, on upskilling opportunities, and in other
ways that we will figure out over time. If any shareowners are concerned that Earth’s Best Employer and Earth’s Safest Place to Work might dilute
our focus on Earth’s Most Customer-Centric Company, let me set your mind at ease. Think of it this way.
If we can operate two businesses as different as consumer ecommerce and AWS, and do both at the highest
level, we can certainly do the same with these two vision statements. In fact, I’m confident they will
reinforce each other. The Climate Pledge In an earlier draft of this letter, I started this section with arguments and examples designed to demonstrate
that human-induced climate change is real. But, bluntly, I think we can stop saying that now. You don’t
have to say that photosynthesis is real, or make the case that gravity is real, or that water boils at 100 degrees
Celsius at sea level. These things are simply true, as is the reality of climate change. Not long ago, most people believed that it would be good to address climate change, but they also thought
it would cost a lot and would threaten jobs, competitiveness, and economic growth. We now know better.
Smart action on climate change will not only stop bad things from happening, it will also make our
economy more efficient, help drive technological change, and reduce risks. Combined, these can lead to
more and better jobs, healthier and happier children, more productive workers, and a more prosperous future.
This doesn’t mean it will be easy. It won’t be. The coming decade will be decisive. The economy in 2030 will
need to be vastly different from what it is today, and Amazon plans to be at the heart of the change. We
launched The Climate Pledge together with Global Optimism in September 2019 because we wanted to
help drive this positive revolution. We need to be part of a growing team of corporations that understand
the imperatives and the opportunities of the 21st century. Now, less than two years later, 53 companies representing almost every sector of the economy have signed
The Climate Pledge. Signatories such as Best Buy, IBM, Infosys, Mercedes-Benz, Microsoft, Siemens, and
Verizon have committed to achieve net-zero carbon in their worldwide businesses by 2040, 10 years ahead of
the Paris Agreement. The Pledge also requires them to measure and report greenhouse gas emissions on a
regular basis; implement decarbonization strategies through real business changes and innovations; and
neutralize any remaining emissions with additional, quantifiable, real, permanent, and socially beneficial
offsets. Credible, quality offsets are precious, and we should reserve them to compensate for economic
activities where low-carbon alternatives don’t exist. The Climate Pledge signatories are making meaningful, tangible, and ambitious commitments. Uber has a
goal of operating as a zero-emission platform in Canada, Europe, and the U.S. by 2030, and Henkel plans to
source 100% of the electricity it uses for production from renewable sources. Amazon is making progress
toward our own goal of 100% renewable energy by 2025, five years ahead of our initial 2030 target. Amazon
is the largest corporate buyer of renewable energy in the world. We have 62 utility-scale wind and solar
projects and 125 solar rooftops on fulfillment and sort centers around the globe. These projects have the
capacity to generate over 6.9 gigawatts and deliver more than 20 million megawatt-hours of energy annually. Transportation is a major component of Amazon’s business operations and the toughest part of our plan
to meet net-zero carbon by 2040. To help rapidly accelerate the market for electric vehicle technology, and to
help all companies transition to greener technologies, we invested more than $1 billion in Rivian – and
ordered 100,000 electric delivery vans from the company. We’ve also partnered with Mahindra in India and
Mercedes-Benz in Europe. These custom electric delivery vehicles from Rivian are already operational, and
they first hit the road in Los Angeles this past February. Ten thousand new vehicles will be on the road as
early as next year, and all 100,000 vehicles will be on the road by 2030 – saving millions of metric tons of
carbon. A big reason we want companies to join The Climate Pledge is to signal to the marketplace that
businesses should start inventing and developing new technologies that signatories need to make good on
the Pledge. Our purchase of 100,000 Rivian electric vans is a perfect example. To further accelerate investment in new technologies needed to build a zero-carbon economy, we introduced
the Climate Pledge Fund last June. The investment program started with $2 billion to invest in visionary
companies that aim to facilitate the transition to a low-carbon economy. Amazon has already announced
investments in CarbonCure Technologies, Pachama, Redwood Materials, Rivian, Turntide Technologies,
ZeroAvia, and Infinium – and these are just some of the innovative companies we hope will build the zerocarbon economy of the future. I have also personally allocated $10 billion to provide grants to help catalyze the systemic change we will
need in the coming decade. We’ll be supporting leading scientists, activists, NGOs, environmental justice
organizations, and others working to fight climate change and protect the natural world. Late last year, I made
my first round of grants to 16 organizations working on innovative and needle-moving solutions. It’s going
to take collective action from big companies, small companies, nation states, global organizations, and
individuals, and I’m excited to be part of this journey and optimistic that humanity can come together to
solve this challenge. Differentiation is Survival and the Universe Wants You to be Typical This is my last annual shareholder letter as the CEO of Amazon, and I have one last thing of utmost
importance I feel compelled to teach. I hope all Amazonians take it to heart. Here is a passage from Richard Dawkins’ (extraordinary) book The Blind Watchmaker. It’s about a basic
fact of biology. “Staving off death is a thing that you have to work at. Left to itself – and that is what it is when it
dies – the body tends to revert to a state of equilibrium with its environment. If you measure some
quantity such as the temperature, the acidity, the water content or the electrical potential in a living
body, you will typically find that it is markedly different from the corresponding measure in the
surroundings. Our bodies, for instance, are usually hotter than our surroundings, and in cold climates
they have to work hard to maintain the differential. When we die the work stops, the temperature
differential starts to disappear, and we end up the same temperature as our surroundings. Not all
animals work so hard to avoid coming into equilibrium with their surrounding temperature, but all
animals do some comparable work. For instance, in a dry country, animals and plants work to
maintain the fluid content of their cells, work against a natural tendency for water to flow from them
into the dry outside world. If they fail they die. More generally, if living things didn’t work actively to
prevent it, they would eventually merge into their surroundings, and cease to exist as autonomous
beings. That is what happens when they die.” While the passage is not intended as a metaphor, it’s nevertheless a fantastic one, and very relevant to
Amazon. I would argue that it’s relevant to all companies and all institutions and to each of our individual
lives too. In what ways does the world pull at you in an attempt to make you normal? How much work does it
take to maintain your distinctiveness? To keep alive the thing or things that make you special? I know a happily married couple who have a running joke in their relationship. Not infrequently, the
husband looks at the wife with faux distress and says to her, “Can’t you just be normal?” They both smile
and laugh, and of course the deep truth is that her distinctiveness is something he loves about her. But, at the
same time, it’s also true that things would often be easier – take less energy – if we were a little more
normal. This phenomenon happens at all scale levels. Democracies are not normal. Tyranny is the historical norm. If
we stopped doing all of the continuous hard work that is needed to maintain our distinctiveness in that
regard, we would quickly come into equilibrium with tyranny.
We all know that distinctiveness – originality – is valuable. We are all taught to “be yourself.” What I’m
really asking you to do is to embrace and be realistic about how much energy it takes to maintain that
distinctiveness. The world wants you to be typical – in a thousand ways, it pulls at you. Don’t let it happen. You have to pay a price for your distinctiveness, and it’s worth it. The fairy tale version of “be yourself ” is that
all the pain stops as soon as you allow your distinctiveness to shine. That version is misleading. Being
yourself is worth it, but don’t expect it to be easy or free. You’ll have to put energy into it continuously. The world will always try to make Amazon more typical – to bring us into equilibrium with our environment.
It will take continuous effort, but we can and must be better than that. *** As always, I attach our 1997 shareholder letter. It concluded with this: “We at Amazon.com are grateful to
our customers for their business and trust, to each other for our hard work, and to our shareholders for their
support and encouragement.” That hasn’t changed a bit. I want to especially thank Andy Jassy for agreeing
to take on the CEO role. It’s a hard job with a lot of responsibility. Andy is brilliant and has the highest
of high standards. I guarantee you that Andy won’t let the universe make us typical. He will muster the
energy needed to keep alive in us what makes us special. That won’t be easy, but it is critical. I also predict it
will be satisfying and oftentimes fun. Thank you, Andy. To all of you: be kind, be original, create more than you consume, and never, never, never let the universe
smooth you into your surroundings. It remains Day 1. Sincerely,Jeffrey P. Bezos Founder and Chief Executive Officer Amazon.com, Inc.
