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Strategic thinking focuses on the longer term and on taking different approaches to deliver customer value; on choosing different sets of activities that cannot easily be imitated, thereby providing a basis for an enduring competitive advantage. Amazon is a good example. Today, Amazon offers 230 million items for sale in America—some 30 times the number sold by Wal-Mart, the world’s biggest retailer, which has its own fast-growing online business. Its total 2013 revenues were $74.5 billion, but when one takes into account the merchandise that other companies sell through its “marketplace” service the sales volume is nearly double that. Though by far the biggest online retailer in America, Amazon is still growing faster than the 17 percent pace of e-commerce as a whole. It is the top online seller in Europe and Japan, too, and has designs on China’s vast market. Last year Amazon was the world’s ninth biggest retailer ranked by sales; by 2018 it may well be in the top two. On top of its online-retail success, Amazon has produced two other transformative businesses Strategic Thinking Essay Discussion Paper.

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The Kindle e-reader pioneered the shift from paper books to electronic ones, creating a market that now accounts for more than a 10th of spending on books in America and which Amazon dominates. Less visible but just as transformative is Amazon’s invention in 2006 of cloud-computing as a pay-as-you-go service, now a $9 billion market. That venture, called Amazon Web Services (AWS), has slashed the technology costs of starting an enterprise or running an existing one. And Amazon enjoys an advantage most competitors envy: Remarkably patient shareholders. The company made a net profit of just $274 million last year, a minuscule amount in relation to its revenues and its $154 billion value on the stock exchange; its shares are valued at more than 500 times last year’s earnings, 34 times the multiple for Wal-Mart. Its core retail business is thought to do little better than break-even; most of its profits come from the independent vendors who sell through Amazon’s marketplace. Such long-termism takes investment. In its early days Amazon avoided direct competition with retailers because its lack of stores made it “capital light”. Today its empire of warehouses and data centers has changed that. Now its pitch to merchants and technologists is that it will build physical assets so that they do not have to. By doing so, it keeps its competitors close and makes them depend on Amazon for key parts of their business models Strategic Thinking Essay Discussion Paper Source: Amazon - Relentless.com, The Economist, Print edition, June 21, 2014.   a) What is strategic thinking? b) Why long-term perspective is important for strategic thinking? c) What are the sources of Amazon’s success described in the mini case above?