Amazon and Netflix Swot Analysis

The two multinational corporations I am researching are Amazon and Netflix. Amazon is the largest online retailer and Netflix is an industry giant in the movie streaming or DVD rental business. Both began as small companies with fewer than 100 employees and now are multi-billion dollar corporations as a result of their innovation and their desire to be elite. Amazon’s mission statement is “to be earth’s most customer-centric company where people can find and discover anything they want to buy online.” Amazon is now the world’s largest online retailer selling just about any product, even when they do not make a profit from them. Jeff Bezos (Amazon’s CEO) uses a cost leadership strategy to produce products and services with a lower cost than the competitors do. By offering the lowest prices he gains market share and brand recognition. For this strategy to succeed Amazon has to provide the widest range of products to achieve the economies of scale and benefit from the low costs of displaying those products online. Customer service is “first class” in Amazon. They have a reputation for being reliable, convenient, offers one of the lowest and fastest shipping, and once again the lowest prices. Strategic acquisitions by Amazon have also helped them thrive. They have acquired many small e-books companies to software companies and even Zappos, and Audible.com. When determining a weakness one must look at the competition and see what they are excelling in compared to one. Amazon’s major competition is Wal-Mart and Target, and they too are industry giants which one can learn a lot from. One major difference is that Wal-Mart and Target have physical presence with thousands of stores worldwide. Jeff Bezos did toy with the idea of opening stores to allow consumers to have a place where they can shop and interact with the products, but he stated that until he can provide a different experience than that of his competition he would not do it. I understand his opinion, but I