Diego Piacentini: Amazon Global Operations

This is Amazon gateway page in 1995. The company, by the way, is 15 years old and it started by selling only books. The most watchful people in the audience might notice One thing that Amazon.com did not have when it was launched. There is no search box. Basically you cannot search books. You have to browse. And it was a million books. Now the search thing was added a few days later. But it was funny that when they decided to launch, they were behind with search technology, but they decided to launch anyway because there's not much search around in the Internet anyway. So second piece of the point, Today Amazon has seven global sites.com UK Germany, France, Japan and Canada. As I said, almost half of the revenue comes from the countries outside of North America. There is one thing in common among all those websites that although you might think that Europe and asia and the U.S. they all have different cultures, different way to purchase products, what we've been able to build in all those 15 years is a very common technology, customer experience and shopping experience across the sites. You see, they have pretty much the same look and feel. There is the same underlying technology. Really, it's all the same. I'm going to talk about this. How can you achieve this in a company that has now, today 40,000 people? Especially how you can keep, as I said, and I emphasize on innovating in those countries. Other piece, Amazon is a global company. And the first thing you want to understand is, by the way, the boxes are where the fulfillment centers are, the phones are where the customer service and the A's is where the websites are. So what you're noticing is, sorry, where the corporate offices are. Where you're noticing is, although we are in the countries that I mentioned, we have lots of operations in other countries. So for example, we have a customer service operation in Costa Rica, we have a development center in South Africa, we have several thousand employees in India, where we have customer service, software development, back office, retail activity. None of them is outsourced. Those are Amazon employees. They live in those countries. So we have several operations in countries where we actually do not have maybe a website. There's also customer service in Ireland is a little hidden by all of the things there.