Amazon Reveals a New Hint About Prime Membership Rolls; Amazon Prime is the company’s $79-a-year membership service. Still, Amazon has never said how many Prime members it has

December 27, 2013 Leave a comment

DECEMBER 26, 2013, 3:47 PM

Amazon Reveals a New Hint About Prime Membership Rolls

By NICK WINGFIELD

SEATTLE — The world’s biggest online retailer has mastered the art of talking a lot about its holiday sales, while saying very little. For years, Amazon has blasted out a press release, a day or so after Christmas, filled with a string of tantalizing-sounding factoids about the holidays at Amazon without actually providing a very meaningful picture of its business.In 2010, Amazon said customers ordered more than 13.7 million items on the site’s peak sales day, Nov. 29 — “a record-breaking 158 items per second” — we were told in one typical release from the company. No word on how many of those “items” were paper clips and how many were plasma television sets.

The 2013 edition of Amazon’s holiday bragfest was surprising because it actually told many of the professionals who follow the company something they actually wanted to know, even if Amazon did it in the most cryptic way possible. In a quote in its press release, Jeffrey Bezos, the chief executive of Amazon, said: “Amazon Prime membership continues to grow, and we now have tens of millions of members worldwide.”

Amazon Prime is the company’s $79-a-year membership service, which provides people with free two-day shipping and a list of other benefits. By all estimates, it has been a big hit for the company. Still, Amazon has never said how many Prime members it has, leaving Wall Street analysts to make educated guesses about just how many people are paying the annual fee for the service, which is crucial to Amazon’s strategy for increasing retail sales, building a video service to compete with Netflix and other ambitions.

Of course, “tens of millions of members” leaves a lot to the imagination. Still, that choice of words clearly implies that Prime membership is north of 20 million accounts, higher than the 16 million to 18 million some analysts had estimated. Amazon also said it added more than a million new Prime customers during the third week of December.

Amazon’s new spirit of transparency did not, however, extend to its Kindle family of devices, the total sales of which are still shrouded in mystery. How many of the devices did Amazon sell this year? The company said only that “millions of customers unwrapped Kindle e-readers and Kindle Fire tablets this holiday season.”

Filed under TMT Trends

Unknown's avatarAbout bambooinnovator
Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

Leave a comment