- Amazon has grown its business almost 10 times over in the past 10 years.
- Founded primarily as an online retailer, Amazon has bulked up its physical retail operations in the US and across the globe in the past decade.
- Amazon also bet heavily on its web services in the 2010s, which has proved highly lucrative for the company.
- Here's how Amazon's priorities and scope have transformed over the past decade.
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In a letter to investors in 2010, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos outlined the threats that he predicted the company would have to contend with as it plotted its future.
Amazon might not be successful expanding internationally, he wrote. It still needed to figure out how to optimize and operate its fulfillment centers. And as the company grew, Bezos predicted, it would have to contend with increasing scrutiny and taxation from governments at home and abroad.
More broadly, Bezos wrote that Amazon's ambitions were largely uncharted territory, making it impossible to predict exactly what the company's future would hold.
"Many of the problems we face have no textbook solutions," Bezos wrote. "And so we - happily - invent new approaches."
For the most part, the bets that Amazon took paid off throughout the 2010s. It amped up its overseas operations, acquired dozens of promising startups, and built out Amazon Web Services into a cloud-computing juggernaut.
In total, the company's net income grew from $1.2 trillion in 2010 to more than $10 trillion in 2018.
Here's a breakdown of moments that defined Amazon's growth in the past decade.
