12-month sales growth: 34.9%
Innovation premium: 58.3%
As one of the few garage tech start-ups to survive the dot com crash, some would expect Amazon to cling onto the business model that saw it through the boom and bust years.
And yet the online retailer has undergone constant periods of reinvention and renewal in order to keep itself ahead of the game.
First it offered a commission-based brokerage service to buyers and sellers of used books. Then it opened itself up to third-party sellers, to aggregate them under its burgeoning brand.
Then it did something that would potentially wreck the industry that served it – it launched the Kindle in 2007 in order to tap into the nascent eBook market.
In just a few short years, Amazon had gone from online seller to aggregator to technology manufacturer of a new product. And yet the sales keep racking up.
“If you want to continuously revitalise the service that you offer to your customers, you cannot stop at what you are good at,” CEO Jeff Bezos told Bloomberg.
“You have to ask what your customers need and want, and then, no matter how hard it is, you better get good at those things.”
