亚马逊致股东信2019 （全文）

亚马逊1997年上市以来，CEO贝佐斯每年都会发布致股东的公开信，在整个国际商界，贝佐斯的股东信始终都被追随者奉为圭臬，是商业史上极为经典的教材。如今，凭借长期主义和以客户为中心，贝佐斯成为世界首富，他历年的股东信，建议大家抽半天时间集中学习。

亚马逊致股东信2019 （全文）

以下是该信的全文（中文翻译仅供参考）

To our shareowners:

Something strange and remarkable has happened over the last 20 years. Take a look at these numbers:

1999 3% 

2000 3% 

2001 6% 

2002 17% 

2003 22% 

2004 25% 

2005 28% 

2006 28% 

2007 29% 

2008 30% 

2009 31% 

2010 34% 

2011 38% 

2012 42% 

2013 46% 

2014 49% 

2015 51% 

2016 54% 

2017 56% 

2018 58%

The percentages represent the share of physical gross merchandise sales sold on Amazon by independent third-party sellers – mostly small- and medium-sized businesses – as opposed to Amazon retail’s own first party sales. Third-party sales have grown from 3% of the total to 58%. To put it bluntly:

Third-party sellers are kicking our first party butt. Badly.

And it’s a high bar too because our first-party business has grown dramatically over that period, from $1.6 billion in 1999 to $117 billion this past year. The compound annual growth rate for our first-party business in that time period is 25%. But in that same time, third-party sales have grown from $0.1 billion to $160 billion – a compound annual growth rate of 52%. To provide an external benchmark, eBay’s gross merchandise sales in that period have grown at a compound rate of 20%, from $2.8 billion to $95 billion.

Why did independent sellers do so much better selling on Amazon than they did on eBay? And why were independent sellers able to grow so much faster than Amazon’s own highly organized first-party sales organization? There isn’t one answer, but we do know one extremely important part of the answer:

We helped independent sellers compete against our first-party business by investing in and offering them the very best selling tools we could imagine and build. There are many such tools, including tools that help sellers manage inventory, process payments, track shipments, create reports, and sell across borders – and we’re inventing more every year. But of great importance are Fulfillment by Amazon and the Prime membership program. In combination, these two programs meaningfully improved the customer experience of buying from independent sellers. With the success of these two programs now so well established, it’s difficult for most people to fully appreciate today just how radical those two offerings were at the time we launched them. We invested in both of these programs at significant financial risk and after much internal debate. We had to continue investing significantly over time as we experimented with different ideas and iterations. We could not foresee with certainty what those programs would eventually look like, let alone whether they would succeed, but they were pushed forward with intuition and heart, and nourished with optimism.

致我们的股东：

在过去的20年里，发生了一些奇怪而卓越的事情。看看这些数字：

1999 3% 

2000 3% 

2001 6% 

2002 17% 

2003 22% 

2004 25% 

2005 28% 

2006 28% 

2007 29% 

2008 30% 

2009 31% 

2010 34% 

2011 38% 

2012 42% 

2013 46% 

2014 49% 

2015 51% 

2016 54% 

2017 56% 

2018 58%

这些百分比代表了独立第三方卖家（主要是中小型企业）在亚马逊上销售的实际商品销售份额，而不是亚马逊零售业自己的第一方销售。第三方销售额从总数的3％增长到58％。说穿了就是：

第三方卖家正在蚕食我们的市场份额。厉害了。

这也是一个很高的标准，因为我们作为第一方的（自营）业务在此期间大幅增长，从1999年的16亿美元增加到去年的1170亿美元。我们在该期间的第一方自营业务的复合年增长率为25％。但与此同时，第三方销售额已从1亿美元增长到1,600亿美元 - 复合年增长率为52％。为了提供外部基准作为比较，eBay在此期间的商品销售总额增长率为20％，从28亿美元增长到950亿美元。

为什么独立卖家在亚马逊上卖得比在eBay上好得多？为什么独立卖家能够比亚马逊高度组织的第一方销售组织快得多？没有一个空整的答案，但我们确实知道答案的一个非常重要的部分：

我们通过投资并向他们提供我们可以想象和构建的最畅销工具，帮助独立卖家与我们的第一方自营业务展开竞争。有许多这样的工具，包括帮助卖家管理库存，处理付款，跟踪货物，创建报告和跨境销售的工具 - 我们每年都在发明更多。但非常重要的是亚马逊的履行和Prime会员计划。结合起来，这两个计划有意义地改善了从独立卖家购买的客户体验。随着这两个项目的成功现已如此成熟，大多数人今天很难完全理解这两个产品在我们推出它们时的激进程度。我们在重大财务风险和经过多次内部辩论后投资了这两个项目。随着我们尝试不同的想法和迭代，我们不得不继续大量投资。我们无法肯定地预见到这些计划最终会是什么样的，更不用说它们是否会成功，但它们会以直觉和内心向前推进，并以乐观的态度得到滋养。

Intuition, curiosity, and the power of wandering

From very early on in Amazon’s life, we knew we wanted to create a culture of builders – people who are curious, explorers. They like to invent. Even when they’re experts, they are “fresh” with a beginner’s mind. They see the way we do things as just the way we do things now. A builder’s mentality helps us approach big, hard-to-solve opportunities with a humble conviction that success can come through iteration: invent, launch, reinvent, relaunch, start over, rinse, repeat, again and again. They know the path to success is anything but straight.

Sometimes (often actually) in business, you do know where you’re going, and when you do, you can be efficient. Put in place a plan and execute. In contrast, wandering in business is not efficient … but it’s also not random. It’s guided – by hunch, gut, intuition, curiosity, and powered by a deep conviction that the prize for customers is big enough that it’s worth being a little messy and tangential to find our way there. Wandering is an essential counter-balance to efficiency. You need to employ both. The outsized discoveries – the “non-linear” ones – are highly likely to require wandering.

AWS’s millions of customers range from startups to large enterprises, government entities to nonprofits, each looking to build better solutions for their end users. We spend a lot of time thinking about what those organizations want and what the people inside them – developers, dev managers, ops managers, CIOs, chief digital officers, chief information security officers, etc. – want.

Much of what we build at AWS is based on listening to customers. It’s critical to ask customers what they want, listen carefully to their answers, and figure out a plan to provide it thoughtfully and quickly (speed matters in business!). No business could thrive without that kind of customer obsession. But it’s also not enough. The biggest needle movers will be things that customers don’t know to ask for. We must invent on their behalf. We have to tap into our own inner imagination about what’s possible.

直觉，好奇心和游荡的力量

从亚马逊生活的早期开始，我们就知道我们想要创造一种建筑者的文化 - 那些好奇的人，探险家。他们喜欢发明。即使他们是专家，他们也是初学者的“新鲜”。他们看待我们做事的方式，就像我们现在做事一样。建筑师的心态帮助我们以谦虚的信念接近巨大的，难以解决的机会，成功可以通过迭代来实现：发明，发射，重新发明，重新启动，重新开始，冲洗，重复，一次又一次。他们知道成功之路绝不是直截了当的。

有时（通常实际上）在商业中，你确实知道你要去哪里，当你做的时候，你就可以有效率。制定计划并执行。相比之下，在商业中徘徊并不高效......但它也不是随机的。它的引导 - 通过预感，直觉，直觉，好奇心，以及深刻的信念，即客户的奖励足够大，以至于找到我们的方式值得有点凌乱和切实。徘徊是效率的重要平衡。你需要同时使用两者。超大的发现 - “非线性”发现 - 极有可能需要徘徊。

AWS的数百万客户包括初创公司，大型企业，政府机构和非营利组织，每个客户都希望为最终用户构建更好的解决方案。我们花了很多时间思考这些组织想要什么以及他们内部的人 - 开发人员，开发经理，操作经理，首席信息官，首席数字官，首席信息安全官等等 - 想要什么（需求）。

我们在AWS上构建的大部分内容都是基于倾听客户的意见。询问客户他们想要什么，仔细聆听他们的答案，并制定计划，以便周到快速地提供它（在业务中加快速度！）是至关重要的。没有这种客户的痴迷，任何企业都无法繁荣发展。但这还不够。最大的推动器将是客户不知道要求的东西。我们必须代表他们发明。我们必须利用自己内心的想象力来实现可能性。

AWS itself – as a whole – is an example. No one asked for AWS. No one. Turns out the world was in fact ready and hungry for an offering like AWS but didn’t know it. We had a hunch, followed our curiosity, took the necessary financial risks, and began building – reworking, experimenting, and iterating countless times as we proceeded.

Within AWS, that same pattern has recurred many times. For example, we invented DynamoDB, a highly scalable, low latency key-value database now used by thousands of AWS customers. And on the listening-carefully-to-customers side, we heard loudly that companies felt constrained by their commercial database options and had been unhappy with their database providers for decades – these offerings are expensive, proprietary, have high-lock-in and punitive licensing terms. We spent several years building our own database engine, Amazon Aurora, a fully-managed MySQL and PostgreSQL-compatible service with the same or better durability and availability as the commercial engines, but at one-tenth of the cost. We were not surprised when this worked.

But we’re also optimistic about specialized databases for specialized workloads. Over the past 20 to 30 years, companies ran most of their workloads using relational databases. The broad familiarity with relational databases among developers made this technology the go-to even when it wasn’t ideal. Though sub-optimal, the data set sizes were often small enough and the acceptable query latencies long enough that you could make it work. But today, many applications are storing very large amounts of data – terabytes and petabytes. And the requirements for apps have changed. Modern applications are driving the need for low latencies, real-time processing, and the ability to process millions of requests per second. It’s not just key-value stores like DynamoDB, but also in-memory databases like Amazon ElastiCache, time series databases like Amazon Timestream, and ledger solutions like Amazon Quantum Ledger Database – the right tool for the right job saves money and gets your product to market faster.

We’re also plunging into helping companies harness Machine Learning. We’ve been working on this for a long time, and, as with other important advances, our initial attempts to externalize some of our early internal Machine Learning tools were failures. It took years of wandering – experimentation, iteration, and refinement, as well as valuable insights from our customers – to enable us to find SageMaker, which launched just 18 months ago. SageMaker removes the heavy lifting, complexity, and guesswork from each step of the machine learning process – democratizing AI. Today, thousands of customers are building machine learning models on top of AWS with SageMaker. We continue to enhance the service, including by adding new reinforcement learning capabilities. Reinforcement learning has a steep learning curve and many moving parts, which has largely put it out of reach of all but the most well-funded and technical organizations, until now. None of this would be possible without a culture of curiosity and a willingness to try totally new things on behalf of customers. And customers are responding to our customer-centric wandering and listening – AWS is now a $30 billion annual run rate business and growing fast.

网络搜索结果

AWS本身 - 作为一个整体 - 就是一个例子。没有人要求AWS。没有人。事实证明，世界已经准备好并渴望获得像AWS这样的产品，但却不知道。我们有一种预感，跟随我们的好奇心，承担了必要的财务风险，并开始建设 - 在我们继续进行时无数次地进行改造，试验和迭代。

在AWS中，相同的模式已多次重复出现。例如，我们发明了DynamoDB，这是一个高度可扩展，低延迟的键值数据库，现在已被数千名AWS客户使用。在仔细聆听客户方面，我们大声听到公司感到受到商业数据库选项的限制，并且几十年来一直对他们的数据库提供商感到不满 - 这些产品价格昂贵，专有，具有高锁定性和惩罚性许可条款。我们花了几年时间构建我们自己的数据库引擎，Amazon Aurora，一个完全托管的MySQL和PostgreSQL兼容服务，具有与商用引擎相同或更好的耐用性和可用性，但成本只有十分之一。当这个工作时，我们并不感到惊讶。

但我们也对专业工作负载的专用数据库持乐观态度。在过去的20到30年中，公司使用关系数据库运行大部分工作负载。开发人员对关系数据库的广泛熟悉使这项技术成为最佳选择，即使它不理想。虽然次优，但数据集大小通常足够小，可接受的查询延迟足够长，您可以使其工作。但是今天，许多应用程序存储了大量的数据 - 太字节和千兆字节。应用程序的要求已经改变。现代应用程序正在推动对低延迟，实时处理以及每秒处理数百万个请求的能力的需求。这不仅仅是关键值商店 DynamoDB，以及Amazon ElastiCache等内存数据库，Amazon Timestream等时间序列数据库，以及Amazon Quantum Ledger数据库等分类账解决方案 - 正确工作的合适工具可以节省资金并更快地将产品推向市场。

我们也正在积极帮助公司利用机器学习。我们已经在这方面工作了很长时间，并且，与其他重要的进展一样，我们最初尝试将我们早期的一些内部机器学习工具外部化是失败的。经过多年的漫游 - 实验，迭代和改进，以及来自客户的宝贵见解 - 使我们能够找到仅在18个月前推出的SageMaker。 SageMaker消除了机器学习过程中每个步骤的繁重，复杂性和猜测 - 使AI民主化。如今，成千上万的客户正在使用SageMaker在AWS之上构建机器学习模型。我们继续加强服务，包括增加新的强化学习能力。强化学习有着陡峭的学习曲线和许多活动部分，直到现在，除了资金最充足的技术组织之外，其他所有部分都远远超出了它。如果没有好奇心的文化以及愿意代表客户尝试全新的事物，这一切都不可能实现。客户正在响应以客户为中心的探索和倾听 - 现在，AWS已经实现了300亿美元的年度运营业务收入并且增长迅速。

Imagining the impossible

Amazon today remains a small player in global retail. We represent a low single-digit percentage of the retail market, and there are much larger retailers in every country where we operate. And that’s largely because nearly 90% of retail remains offline, in brick and mortar stores. For many years, we considered how we might serve customers in physical stores, but felt we needed first to invent something that would really delight customers in that environment. With Amazon Go, we had a clear vision. Get rid of the worst thing about physical retail: checkout lines. No one likes to wait in line. Instead, we imagined a store where you could walk in, pick up what you wanted, and leave.

Getting there was hard. Technically hard. It required the efforts of hundreds of smart, dedicated computer scientists and engineers around the world. We had to design and build our own proprietary cameras and shelves and invent new computer vision algorithms, including the ability to stitch together imagery from hundreds of cooperating cameras. And we had to do it in a way where the technology worked so well that it simply receded into the background, invisible. The reward has been the response from customers, who’ve described the experience of shopping at Amazon Go as “magical.” We now have 10 stores in Chicago, San Francisco, and Seattle, and are excited about the future.

想象那些不可能的领域

亚马逊今天仍然是全球零售业的小型企业。我们代表零售市场的低个位数百分比，而且我们经营的每个国家都有更大的零售商。这主要是因为近90％的零售业仍然在实体商店中（线下）。多年来，我们一直在考虑如何为实体店中的客户提供服务，但我们认为我们首先需要发明能够真正让客户满意的环境。通过亚马逊Go，我们有一个清晰的愿景。摆脱实体零售最糟糕的事情：结账线（收银）。没有人喜欢排队等候。相反，我们想象一个商店，你可以走进去，拿起你想要的东西，然后离开。

实现这些想象很难。技术上很难。它需要全世界数百名智能，专注的计算机科学家和工程师的努力。我们必须设计和构建我们自己的专有相机和架子，并发明新的计算机视觉算法，包括将来自数百个合作相机的图像拼接在一起的能力。而且我们必须以一种技术运作良好的方式来实现它，它简单地退回到业务场景中。这个项目的回报则是客户的回应，他们将在亚马逊Go购物的体验描述为“神奇的”。我们现在在芝加哥，旧金山和西雅图拥有10家商店，并对未来感到兴奋。

Failure needs to scale too

As a company grows, everything needs to scale, including the size of your failed experiments. If the size of your failures isn’t growing, you’re not going to be inventing at a size that can actually move the needle. Amazon will be experimenting at the right scale for a company of our size if we occasionally have multibillion-dollar failures. Of course, we won’t undertake such experiments cavalierly. We will work hard to make them good bets, but not all good bets will ultimately pay out. This kind of large-scale risk taking is part of the service we as a large company can provide to our customers and to society. The good news for shareowners is that a single big winning bet can more than cover the cost of many losers.

Development of the Fire phone and Echo was started around the same time. While the Fire phone was a failure, we were able to take our learnings (as well as the developers) and accelerate our efforts building Echo and Alexa. The vision for Echo and Alexa was inspired by the Star Trek computer. The idea also had origins in two other arenas where we’d been building and wandering for years: machine learning and the cloud. From Amazon’s early days, machine learning was an essential part of our product recommendations, and AWS gave us a front row seat to the capabilities of the cloud. After many years of development, Echo debuted in 2014, powered by Alexa, who lives in the AWS cloud.

既便是失败也需要扩展

随着公司的发展，一切都需要扩展，包括失败实验的规模。如果你的失败的规模没有增长，你就不会有更多细致发明。如果偶尔有数十亿美元的失败，亚马逊将以适当的规模为我们规模的公司进行试验。当然，我们不会冒进进行这样的实验。我们将努力使他们做出好的赌注，但并非所有好的赌注都会最终付出代价。这种大规模的风险承担是我们作为大公司可以为我们的客户和社会提供的服务的一部分。对于股东来说，好消息是，一次大赢的赌注可以弥补许多次失败的成本。

Fire手机和Echo的开发大约在同一时间开始。虽然Fire手机失败了，但我们能够接受我们的学习（以及开发人员）并加快我们构建Echo和Alexa的工作。 Echo和Alexa的愿景受到了星际迷航计算机的启发。这个想法也起源于我们多年来一直在建设和徘徊的另外两个领域：机器学习和云计算。从亚马逊早期开始，机器学习是我们产品推荐的重要组成部分，AWS为我们提供了云端功能的前排座位。经过多年的发展，Echo于2014年首次亮相，由AWS云中的Alexa提供支持。

No customer was asking for Echo. This was definitely us wandering. Market research doesn’t help. If you had gone to a customer in 2013 and said “Would you like a black, always-on cylinder in your kitchen about the size of a Pringles can that you can talk to and ask questions, that also turns on your lights and plays music?” I guarantee you they’d have looked at you strangely and said “No, thank you.”

Since that first-generation Echo, customers have purchased more than 100 million Alexa-enabled devices. Last year, we improved Alexa’s ability to understand requests and answer questions by more than 20%, while adding billions of facts to make Alexa more knowledgeable than ever. Developers doubled the number of Alexa skills to over 80,000, and customers spoke to Alexa tens of billions more times in 2018 compared to 2017. The number of devices with Alexa built-in more than doubled in 2018. There are now more than 150 different products available with Alexa built-in, from headphones and PCs to cars and smart home devices. Much more to come!

One last thing before closing. As I said in the first shareholder letter more than 20 years ago, our focus is on hiring and retaining versatile and talented employees who can think like owners. Achieving that requires investing in our employees, and, as with so many other things at Amazon, we use not just analysis but also intuition and heart to find our way forward.

没有客户具体要求Echo应该如何。这绝对是我们自身的徘徊。市场研究并没有多少帮助。如果你在2013年去过一位顾客并且说“你想在你的厨房里放一个黑色的，永远在线的圆筒，大小与Pringles一样，你可以和他们交谈并提出问题，这也会打开你的灯光并播放音乐“我向你保证他们会奇怪地看着你说”不，谢谢你。“

自第一代Echo以来，客户已经购买了超过1亿台支持Alexa的设备。去年，我们将Alexa理解请求和回答问题的能力提高了20％以上，同时增加了数十亿的事实，使Alexa比以往任何时候都更有智能。开发人员将Alexa技能的数量翻了一番，达到80,000以上，与2017年相比，2018年客户对Alexa的数量增加了数十亿次。与2018年Alexa内置的设备数量相比增加了一倍多。现在有超过150种不同的产品内置Alexa，从耳机和PC到汽车和智能家居设备。还有更多！

最后还有一个很重要的是，正如我在20多年前的第一份股东信中所说，我们的重点是雇佣和留住能够像主人翁一样思考的多才多艺的员工。实现这一目标需要对我们的员工进行投资，而且，与亚马逊的许多其他事情一样，我们不仅使用分析，还使用直觉和内心来寻找前进的方向。

Last year, we raised our minimum wage to $15-an-hour for all full-time, part-time, temporary, and seasonal employees across the U.S. This wage hike benefitted more than 250,000 Amazon employees, as well as over 100,000 seasonal employees who worked at Amazon sites across the country last holiday. We strongly believe that this will benefit our business as we invest in our employees. But that is not what drove the decision. We had always offered competitive wages. But we decided it was time to lead – to offer wages that went beyond competitive. We did it because it seemed like the right thing to do.

Today I challenge our top retail competitors (you know who you are!) to match our employee benefits and our $15 minimum wage. Do it! Better yet, go to $16 and throw the gauntlet back at us. It’s a kind of competition that will benefit everyone.

Many of the other programs we have introduced for our employees came as much from the heart as the head. I’ve mentioned before the Career Choice program, which pays up to 95% of tuition and fees towards a certificate or diploma in qualified fields of study, leading to in-demand careers for our associates, even if those careers take them away from Amazon. More than 16,000 employees have now taken advantage of the program, which continues to grow. Similarly, our Career Skills program trains hourly associates in critical job skills like resume writing, how to communicate effectively, and computer basics. In October of last year, in continuation of these commitments, we signed the President’s Pledge to America’s Workers and announced we will be upskilling 50,000 U.S. employees through our range of innovative training programs.

Our investments are not limited to our current employees or even to the present. To train tomorrow’s workforce, we have pledged $50 million, including through our recently announced Amazon Future Engineer program, to support STEM and CS education around the country for elementary, high school, and university students, with a particular focus on attracting more girls and minorities to these professions. We also continue to take advantage of the incredible talents of our veterans. We are well on our way to meeting our pledge to hire 25,000 veterans and military spouses by 2021. And through the Amazon Technical Veterans Apprenticeship program, we are providing veterans on-the-job training in fields like cloud computing.

去年，我们将全美所有全职，兼职，临时和季节性员工的最低工资提高到每小时15美元。这项工资上涨使超过250,000名亚马逊员工以及超过100,000名季节性员工受益。去年假期在全国各地的亚马逊网站工作。我们坚信，当我们投资于员工时，这将有利于我们的业务。但这不是推动决定的原因。我们一直提供有竞争力的工资。但我们认为是时候领导 - 提供超出竞争力的工资。我们这样做是因为它似乎是正确的做法。

今天，我挑战我们的顶级零售竞争对手（你知道你是谁！），以匹配我们的员工福利和15美元的最低工资。做吧！更好的是，提高到16美元，然后向我们发出挑战。这是一种有益于每个人的竞争。

我们为员工介绍的许多其他计划都是从头脑中获得的。我在职业选择计划之前已经提到过，该计划向合格的学习领域的证书或文凭支付高达95％的学费和费用，导致我们的员工需要职业生涯，即使这些职业将他们带离亚马逊。现在已有超过16,000名员工利用该计划，该计划将继续增长。同样，我们的职业技能计划包括培训关键工作技能，如简历写作，如何有效沟通和计算机基础知识。去年10月，为了履行这些承诺，我们签署了总统对美国工人的承诺，并宣布我们将通过我们的创新培训计划提高50,000名美国员工的工资。

我们的投资不仅限于现有员工，甚至不限于现在。为了培训明天的员工队伍，我们承诺提供5000万美元，包括通过我们最近宣布的亚马逊未来工程师计划，支持全国各地的小学，高中和大学学生的STEM和CS教育，特别注重吸引更多女孩和少数民族对这些职业。我们还继续利用退伍军人的优秀才能。我们正在努力履行我们在2021年之前雇用25,000名退伍军人和军人配偶的承诺。通过亚马逊技术退伍军人学徒计划，我们为云计算等领域的退伍军人提供在职培训。

网络搜索结果

A huge thank you to our customers for allowing us to serve you while always challenging us to do even better, to our shareowners for your continuing support, and to all our employees worldwide for your hard work and pioneering spirit. Teams all across Amazon are listening to customers and wandering on their behalf!

As always, I attach a copy of our original 1997 letter. It remains Day 1.

Sincerely,

Jeffrey P. Bezos

Founder and Chief Executive Officer

Amazon.com, Inc.

非常感谢我们的客户，让我们有机会为您提供服务，同时始终挑战我们可以做得更好，感谢我们的股东所提供持续的支持，以及感谢我们全体员工的辛勤工作和开拓精神。亚马逊各地的团队都在倾听客户的声音，并为客户而探索！

和往常一样，我附上1997年原始信件的副本。它仍然是第1天。

此致

杰弗里P.贝索（佐）斯

创始人兼首席执行官

亚马逊公司