'We are famously unprofitable
'We are famously unprofitable': A 36-year-old Jeff Bezos on Amazon
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Amazon was once Jeff Bezos's "famously unprofitable company", as the former CEO said in an exclusive 2000 BBC Newsnight interview.
Amazon was once Jeff Bezos's "famously unprofitable company", as the former CEO said in an exclusive 2000 BBC Newsnight interview. Nearly 25 years on, the ubiquitous company has become one of a handful of companies globally valued at over $2 trillion.
On 8 June 2000, the BBC presenter Jeremy Vine was pictured sitting behind the Newsnight desk, poring over a report on a seemingly flailing e-commerce market. Sitting across the table from him was that night's guest: 36-year-old Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon.com, Inc.
At the time of the interview on the BBC's flagship current affairs program, Amazon had reached a pivotal point in its history. By mid-2000, the dotcom boom had created an economic bubble that began to reach its bursting point. Dozens of online businesses, including Amazon, which hovered near the gravitational center of the dot-com bubble, were starting to feel its impact.
While Amazon garnered $1.6bn (£1.27bn) in sales in 1999, it also suffered net losses of $720m (£567m), as Vine highlighted in his Newsnight report, and the company's share price was volatile, dropping from $113 a share in December 1999 to $52 in June 2000.
"People used to say Amazon is 'amazing,'" said Vine, launching into the interview. "And now they say: 'isn't it amazing that Amazon is losing so much money?'"
"Well, we are a famously unprofitable company," Bezos responded, largely unfazed. "And that is a conscious strategy and an investment decision."
Twenty-four years after the interview, and 30 years after Amazon's start, Vine can still remember many aspects of the interview – and Bezos. "I had some hostile questions," Vine tells In History. "And he just batted them away. Never, ever broke a sweat, literally."
"I do remember thinking: 'this guy is quite a happy soul'," says Vine. "He just had a spring in his step, and I, looking back on it – I've always thought he already knew at that point that he was going to be the richest man on Earth."
The e-commerce fairytale
Jeff Bezos founded the company on 5 July 1994 in a garage in Bellevue, Washington, with the site launching a year later. The worldwide web was still in its infancy (known as Web 1.0), and only a few companies had begun to see the potential of web-based businesses. Amazon started out as an online bookseller, touting the world's largest collection of ebooks at the time, as vast as the eponymous river it was named after, and doubled down on books to become a central player in the burgeoning e-commerce market.
