A Recap of 1998

Heads-down focus on customers helped us make substantial progress in 1998:

Sales grew from $148 million in 1997 to $610 million—a 313 percent increase.

Cumulative customer accounts grew from 1.5 million at the end of 1997 to 6.2 million at the end of 1998—an increase of over 300 percent.

Despite this strong new customer growth, the percentage of orders placed on the Amazon.com website by repeat customers grew from over 58 percent in the fourth quarter of 1997 to over 64 percent in the same period in 1998.

Our first major product expansion, the Amazon.com music store, became the leading online music retailer in its first full quarter.

Following their October launch under the Amazon brand and with Amazon.com technology, the combined fourth-quarter sales in the UK and German stores nearly quadrupled over the third quarter, establishing Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.de as the leading online booksellers in their markets.

The addition of music was followed by the addition of video and gifts in November, and we became the leading online video retailer in only six weeks.

Twenty-five percent of our fourth-quarter 1998 sales was derived from Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.de, and music, video, and gift sales on Amazon.com, all very new businesses.

We significantly improved the customer experience, with innovations like 1-Click^SM shopping, Gift Click, storewide sales rank, and instant recommendations.

1998’s revenue and customer growth and achievement of continued growth in 1999 were and are dependent on expansion of our infrastructure. Some highlights:

In 1998 our employee base grew from approximately six hundred to over twenty-one hundred, and we significantly strengthened our management team.

We opened distribution and customer service centers in the United Kingdom and Germany and in, early 1999, announced the lease of a highly mechanized distribution center of approximately 323,000 square feet in Fernley, Nevada. This latest addition will more than double our total distribution capacity and allows us to even further improve time-to-mailbox for customers.

Inventories rose from $9 million at the beginning of the year to $30 million by year end, enabling us to improve product availability for our customers and improve product costs through direct purchasing from manufacturers.

Our cash and investment balances, following our May 1998 high yield debt offering and early 1999 convertible debt offering, now stand at well over $1.5 billion (on a pro forma basis), affording us substantial financial strength and strategic flexibility.

We’re fortunate to benefit from a business model that is cash-favored and capital efficient. As we do not need to build physical stores or stock those stores with inventory, our centralized distribution model has allowed us to build our business to a billion-dollar sales rate with just $30 million in inventory and $30 million in net plant and equipment. In 1998, we generated $31 million in operating cash flow which more than offset net fixed asset additions of $28 million.

Our Customers

We intend to build the world’s most customer-centric company. We hold as axiomatic that customers are perceptive and smart, and that brand image follows reality and not the other way around. Our customers tell us that they choose Amazon.com and tell their friends about us because of the selection, ease-of-use, low prices, and service that we deliver.

But there is no rest for the weary. I constantly remind our employees to be afraid, to wake up every morning terrified. Not of our competition, but of our customers. Our customers have made our business what it is, they are the ones with whom we have a relationship, and they are the ones to whom we owe a great obligation. And we consider them to be loyal to us—right up until the second that someone else offers them a better service.

We must be committed to constant improvement, experimentation, and innovation in every initiative. We love to be pioneers, it’s in the DNA of the company, and it’s a good thing, too, because we’ll need that pioneering spirit to succeed. We’re proud of the differentiation we’ve built through constant innovation and relentless focus on customer experience, and we believe our initiatives in 1998 reflect it: our music, video, UK and German stores, like our US bookstore, are best of breed.

Work Hard, Have Fun, Make History

It would be impossible to produce results in an environment as dynamic as the Internet without extraordinary people. Working to create a little bit of history isn’t supposed to be easy, and, well, we’re finding that things are as they’re supposed to be! We now have a team of twenty-one hundred smart, hard-working, passionate folks who put customers first. Setting the bar high in our approach to hiring has been, and will continue to be, the single most important element of Amazon.com’s success.

During our hiring meetings, we ask people to consider three questions before making a decision:

Will you admire this person? If you think about the people you’ve admired in your life, they are probably people you’ve been able to learn from or take an example from. For myself, I’ve always tried hard to work only with people I admire, and I encourage folks here to be just as demanding. Life is definitely too short to do otherwise.

Will this person raise the average level of effectiveness of the group they’re entering? We want to fight entropy. The bar has to continuously go up. I ask people to visualize the company five years from now. At that point, each of us should look around and say, “The standards are so high now—boy, I’m glad I got in when I did!”

Along what dimension might this person be a superstar? Many people have unique skills, interests, and perspectives that enrich the work environment for all of us. It’s often something that’s not even related to their jobs. One person here is a National Spelling Bee champion (1978, I believe). I suspect it doesn’t help her in her everyday work, but it does make working here more fun if you can occasionally snag her in the hall with a quick challenge: “onomatopoeia!”

Goals for 1999

As we look forward, we believe that the overall e-commerce opportunity is enormous, and 1999 will be an important year. Although Amazon.com has established a strong leadership position, it is certain that competition will even further accelerate. We plan to invest aggressively to build the foundation for a multi-billion-dollar revenue company serving tens of millions of customers with operational excellence and high efficiency. Although this level of forward investment is costly and carries many inherent risks, we believe it will provide the best end-to-end experience for customers, and actually offer the least risky long-term value creation approach for investors.

The elements of our 1999 plan may not surprise you:

Distribution capacity: We intend to build out a significant distribution infrastructure to ensure that we can support all the sales our customers demand, with speedy access to a deep product inventory.

Systems capacity: We’ll be expanding our systems capacity to support similar growth levels. The systems group has a significant task: expand to meet near term growth, restructure systems for multi-billion-dollar scale and tens of millions of customers, build out features and systems for new initiatives and new innovations, and increase operational excellence and efficiency. All while keeping a billion-dollar, eight-million-customer store up and available on a 24/7 basis.

Brand promise: Amazon.com is still a small and young company relative to the major offline retailers, and we must ensure that we build wide, strong customer relationships during this critical period.

Expanded product and service offerings: In 1999, we will continue to enhance the scope of our current product and service offerings, as well as add new initiatives. Amazon.com Auctions is our most recent addition. If any of you have not tried this new service, I encourage you to run—not walk—to www.amazon.com and click on the Auctions tab. As an Amazon.com customer, you are preregistered to both bid and sell. As a seller, you have access to Amazon.com’s eight million experienced online shoppers.

Bench strength and processes: We’ve complicated our business dramatically with new products, services, geographies, acquisitions, and additions to our business model. We intend to invest in teams, processes, communication, and people-development practices. Scaling in this way is among the most challenging and difficult elements of our plan.

Amazon.com has made a number of strides forward in the past year, but there is still an enormous amount to learn and to do. We remain optimistic, but we also know we must remain vigilant and maintain a sense of urgency. We face many challenges and hurdles. Among them, aggressive, capable, and well-funded competition; the growth challenges and execution risk associated with our own expansion; and the need for large continuing investments to meet an expanding market opportunity.

The most important thing I could say in this letter was said in last year’s letter, which detailed our long-term investment approach. Because we have so many new shareholders (this year we’re printing more than two hundred thousand of these letters—last year we printed about thirteen thousand), we’ve appended last year’s letter immediately after this year’s. I invite you to please read the section titled “It’s All About the Long Term.” You might want to read it twice to make sure we’re the kind of company you want to be invested in. As it says there, we don’t claim it’s the right philosophy, we just claim it’s ours!

All the best and sincere thanks once again to our customers and shareholders and all the folks here who are working passionately every day to build an important and lasting company.