<u>S&P500 stock - Amazon.com (</u><u>NASDAQ: AMZN</u><u>)</u>

Amazing Amazon - Wealth Creator 

Now 43 year old Jeff Bezos started this Universe's biggest bookstore in 1994 which has rapidly become the biggest store for everything. The website offers all kinds of books, music, DVDs, and videos which still accounts for the majority of the firm's sales. Expansion of Amazon.com added magazines and newspapers, video games, software, Amazon shorts, electronics, cameras and photos, cell phones and service, computers and PC hardware, office products, musical instruments, outlet, home and garden products, bed and bath products, furniture and decor, gourmet food, kitchen and house wares, pet supplies, automotives, tools and hardware, industrial and scientific, apparel and accessories, shoes, jewelry and watches, grocery, beauty, health and personal care, sports and outdoors, toys and games, and baby products. Amazon has always been a model for E-commerce companies.

Amazon has started providing Amazon Marketplace and Merchants programs, which enable third parties to sell their products on its Web sites; allow customers to shop for products owned by third parties using its features and technologies; and enable individuals to complete transactions that include multiple sellers in a single checkout process. The company also provides merchant services for third-party retailers; marketing and promotional services; and Web services comprising Amazon simple storage service, Amazon elastic compute cloud, Amazon simple queue service, Amazon mechanical turk, and Amazon e-commerce service for developers. In addition, it operates other Web sites, including a9.com and alexa.com that enable search and navigation; and www.imdb.com, a movie database. Its retail Web sites includes amazon.com, amazon.ca, amazon.de, amazon.fr, amazon.co.jp, amazon.co.uk, joyo.com, shopbop.com, and endless.com.

Bezos has focused everything at Amazon's Web site on making it easy for visitors to find what they want, discover what they didn't know they wanted, and buy it fast-with just one click of the mouse. Nearly 70% of Amazon's sales are from repeat customers. Amazon has ended up being in just about everything.

Tom Szkutak is the Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. Tom started his career with GE handling the fiances of its various divisions like GE Lighting, GE Plastics and GE Investments. He joined joined Amazon.com in October 2002.

Jeffery Blackburn is the Senior Vice President, Business Development. He left Deutsche Morgan Grenfell where he was the Assistant Vice President  in 1998.

Amazon offers an easily searchable trove of 3.1 million titles-15 times more than any bookstore on the planet and without the costly overhead of multimillion-dollar buildings and scads of store clerks. That paves the way for each of its 1,600 employees to generate, on average, $375,000 in annual revenues-more than triple that of No. 1 bricks-and-mortar bookseller Barnes & Noble Inc.'s 27,000 employees. Amazon has delighted investors with impressive results in the first two quarters of the year, said third-quarter net income more than quadrupled to $80 million, or 19 cents per share, from $19 million, or 5 cents per share, a year earlier. Revenue rose 41 percent to $3.26 billion. Operating income rose to $123 million from $40 million, above its own forecast for a range of $75 million to $110 million. The results beat average Wall Street estimates of 18 cents per share in profit on $3.13 billion in revenue. For the fourth quarter, Amazon said it expects net sales of $5.1 billion to $5.45 billion, with operating income of $221 million to $291 million.

Seattle-based Amazon, the second most popular e-commerce site behind auctioneer ebay, has pared back the rate of its spending this year, which helped improve margins and boost earnings growth while pushing up its share price 136 percent since January 3. Amazon fully-valued--its price-earnings ratio is far higher than Internet companies and retail rivals. Amazon trades at 59 times projected forward-looking earnings, compared with eBay at 22 times, and Wal-Mart Stores at 13 times estimated 2008 earnings.

On Monday, the online retail giant unveiled its Kindle e-book reader, a wireless portable reading device with instant access to Amazon e-book store. The device comes with a headphone jack for audiobooks, as well as an e-mail address. Kindle uses a new technology called electronic paper, something that doesn't seem like a computer monitor and gives the user a completely different experience from using a computer. The user does not need to rush to a wi-fi hot spot to download; instead kindle uses a cell phone like wireless technology. This is more like a blackberry device but at the same time it is not a black berry. Kindle is aimed at the restless travelers and the serious business type who can access newspapers, magazines, books, blogs wherever they are, be it in bed or train. Kindle uses advanced wireless technology and does away with the monthly wireless bills, service or data plans and yearly contracts.

This product has got all it takes to become a disruptor and looks like will add substantially to the revenues. When the market capitalization surged Amazon made appropriate acquisitions to suit its business model. Amazon's complete focus on profitability will ensure great results year on year. And now with its focus on new hardware devices which are synchronized with its e-store, the company will start accumulating more and more money. This is a company that believes in business model innovation and is always looking to develop disruptive products. Amazon over years will create a lot of wealth for its investors.