Amazon showed up all over tech expert Mary Meeker’s massive annual Internet Trends report this year, demonstrating how much the tech giant has branched out in recent years.
Presented at Recode’s Code 2018 conference, the 294-slide deck spent plenty of time on e-commerce, where Amazon continues to thrive. Meeker reports Amazon’s share of the e-commerce market has increased from 20 percent in 2013 to 28 percent this year.
While e-commerce has upended traditional retail, digital sales are still a pretty small piece of the overall pie, but the ratio is rising. According to Meeker’s report, e-commerce made up approximately 13 percent of overall U.S. retail sales up from 5 percent a decade ago.
Amazon has developed an early lead in the competitive smart speaker, though that advantage appears to be shrinking. Meeker reports an installed base of 30 million Amazon Echo devices in the U.S. And the digital brain powering the speakers, Alexa, has amassed more than 40,000 capabilities.
Audiences are rising rapidly from streaming services, especially from mobile devices. Amazon has 100 million Prime subscribers worldwide, though it is unknown how many use Prime Video. Netflix, Amazon’s main competition in the streaming race, maintains a lead with 125 million subscribers.
Then there’s Twitch, the game streaming site that Amazon bought for close to a $1 billion in 2014. Since Amazon bought the site, the number of hours spent streaming on Twitch has nearly doubled.
The epic report touches on everything from e-commerce, to smartphone sales, to cloud technology innovations to the nature of work and household spending. It also delves into one of the most contentious issues of the time: immigration.
In her report, Meeker said 56 percent of the highest valued tech companies in the U.S. were founded by immigrants. Uber, WeWork, SpaceX, OfferUp and Instacart are all examples of highly valued private companies with first-generation immigrant founders. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and Apple founder Steve Jobs are both second-generation immigrants, while Google co-founder Sergey Brin and Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin are first-generation immigrants.
Here is Meeker’s full report:
Internet Trends Report 2018 by Nat Levy on Scribd
