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Section 1- Company History
A young man named Jeffery Bezos founded Amazon, the world famous online market place in 1994 in Seattle, Washington. It made its debut on the world wide web in 1995 under the name Cadabra, Inc. It was renamed in that same year, Amazon, Inc. The name Amazon came about because they wanted the company to be at the top of the alphabetical lists and a powerful ‘A’ name was Amazon, after the largest river in the world. Amazon’s original product was books. A typical book store, at any given time could hold 200,000 titles while their online store could hold an unlimited amount of titles. In fact, the logo, consisting of the company name Amazon, has an arrow below it pointing from A to Z, meaning that they have all titles and products from A to Z. The logo also contains a smile, hoping for complete customer satisfaction with every purchase. Soon after launching, Amazon quickly began selling other items such as clothing, food, furniture, toys, electronics, DVD’s, VHS’s, software and video games. The company ultimately popularized online shopping. They announced their IPO in 1997 and began trading on the NASDAQ stock exchange at $18.00 per share. A year later the site launched international in the United Kingdom and Germany. With a fast growing company, they began opening fulfillment centers around the United States to keep up with business demands. Founder Jeffery Bezos was named Time Magazine’s ‘Person of the Year’ in 1999. This was a huge achievement and honor for the four-year-old company. Over the next couple of years, Amazon launches new components of their site such as Amazon.com auctions in 1999, Amazon Marketplace and their kitchen store and joining alliances with Toys “R” Us in 2000, Amazon.com Travel store and an alliance with Target in 2001. In 2002, Amazon Inc. recorded their first net profit during the 4th quarter of 2001.

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