Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) is a publicly listed company headquartered in Seattle, Washington, United States that owns 11 consumer brands across 3 categories, and has 5 recorded transactions.[1]
Amazon began selling books online in 1994 and is now among the largest companies in the world. Its 2017 purchase of Whole Foods Market gave it a physical grocery estate, and it has since built its own grocery and household brands sold through its store.
Amazon acquired Whole Foods Market for $42 per share in cash, its largest acquisition and its entry into physical grocery retail. Share prices of established supermarket chains fell sharply on the announcement, and Amazon cut Whole Foods prices within days of closing.
Amazon acquired Twitch for about $970 million in cash, outbidding Google. Live game streaming was then a niche few large companies took seriously, and Twitch remains the centre of that economy a decade later.
Amazon acquired Zappos for about $1.2 billion in stock. Zappos kept its own management, culture and headquarters, an unusual degree of independence that Amazon maintained for years afterwards.
Amazon acquired Audible for about $300 million, pairing spoken-word audio with the Kindle it had launched a few months earlier. Audible had sold the first portable digital audio player in 1997, four years before the iPod.