Jeff Bezos Just Confirmed Amazon’s Growth Is Slowing
Brick-and-mortar merchants have stepped up their digital game.
The retail juggernaut slips a bit.
Photographer: Jeenah Moon/Bloomberg
The annual Amazon.com Inc. shareholder letters from CEO Jeff Bezos are eagerly awaited in Silicon Valley for pearls of wisdom from the world’s richest man and an admired business leader. This year’s edition was extra revealing, although maybe not in the way Bezos intended.
Bezos’s latest letter, released on Thursday, opens with the first-ever disclosure of Amazon’s total share of sales from the merchants that use the company’s e-commerce sites as a sales conduit. The company has long said that those merchants sell about half of the individual items sold on Amazon, but it has never given their contribution to the total value of physical merchandise sold on the site.