ARAB ACADEMY GRADUATE SCHOOL OF BUSINESS – SMART VILLAGE

COMPREHENSIVE EXAM <FALL 2020>

Dear Students,

Congratulations on being one step away from earning your degree!

Graduate School of Business (Smart Village campus) wishes you; your family and your loved ones
to be all safe and well. Based on the online newly implemented system in alignment with the
government precautionary procedures a new assessment has been developed for your
comprehensive exam. Please read carefully the description, the deliverables and the academic
integrity policy.

Description

The comprehensive examination is an open resources exam. It is a comprehensive case followed by six
questions based upon the program objectives. Please note that you will need a minimum of 60% to be granted
an overall grade of “Pass” and successfully pass your exam.

DELIVERABLES

1- You will receive your exam via email, from: exam.gsbsv@gmail.com; on Friday 18
December 2020, at 10:00 am
2- Deadline of acceptance Saturday 19 December 2020 10:00pm, based on which your exam
is 36 hours for your convenience. After which no paper will be accepted
3- Based on points 1 and 2 it is your responsibility to ensure a stable PC and a good internet
connection
4- Cover page should include: comprehensive exam, Fall 2020, student name
5- Papers without references will not be evaluated
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font 16 - 14
7- Please close your answers in PDF
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exam.gsbsv@gmail.com
9- Return email title should include: comprehensive exam, Fall 2020, full student name

Failing to comply to any of the exam requirement will lead to an automatic F.

Academic Integrity

Please be informed that all exams will be subjective to plagiarism check and class similarity
check, which means that copy past papers and high resemblance papers will be result in an
automatic F.

COMPREHENSIVE EXAM – AAGSBSV – FALL 1

ANALYZING AMAZON

Amazon.com Overview
The Amazon success story started in July 1995 by Jeff Bezos a computer science and
electrical engineering graduate from Princeton University. After his resignation from an
investment Bank, he settled in Seattle and found what is now known as Amazon. Bezos
did not know much about the Internet. However, "he came across a statistic that the Internet
was growing at 2300%; this convinced him that this was a large growth opportunity".
Amazon’s choice of the location in Settle was obvious for its rich technological talent and
the close proximity of the book wholesalers in Rosenberg.
Amazon came into being in July 1995 and was up to the public in 1997 It is claimed that
Bezos was one of the few individuals who understood the real power of E-commerce and
the entire internet retail business. Under Amazon vision, Bezos injected two
comprehensive ideas to the E-commerce and these are building the customer-centric
company world over, and also creating an environment where customers could easily buy
almost anything they wanted to buy. Indeed, his vision has been hugely achieved since
1995 (Hof, 2001).

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Amazon.com’s Objectives& Strategy
In its business model, Amazon.com has identified the following as key success factors.
First of all, a strong brand name location. Then providing clients with marvelous value and
a superior shopping knowledge. After that, considerable sales capacity. Finally, Realizing
economies of scope and scale (Modi et all, 2000). Amazon.com's marketing strategy is
designed to strengthen the Amazon brand name, increase customer traffic to the
Amazon.com Web sites, build customer loyalty, encourage repeat purchases and
develop incremental product and service revenue opportunities.

Customer- centric
Customer-centric involved asking customers what they wanted, and sorting out how their
needs would be delivered to them, and in the end, delivering it to them. According to Bezos,
that is the traditional term of customer-centric. And Amazon focused on this traditional
view with success evidenced over the years. The other meaning for customercentric is
innovation on behalf of the customers. According to Amazon,
Innovation simply means searching for what the customers don’t know they want and
delivering it to them. The third meaning is the personalization nature of the internet. In
order to suite this third meaning of customer-centric, Amazon redesigned their store to
suite each customer, by launching a ‘your store service’. This translated this vision into
reality. Amazon valued to deliver convenient, selected, services at a broadest price
(Timothy et all, 2000).
Although critics thought that customercentricism of any given company is the same with
any other company, Amazon’s customers have continued to rise over the years. And despite
that Amazon began as a global bookstore, the company also intended to be a place where
customers could buy anything online. Amazon moved its attention to very new category of
products, which includes kitchen ware, tools, and Auctions (Wiggins, 2001). Additionally,
as a part of Amazon.com’s customer centric strategies, its value creation and proposition
starts with Amazon.com’s symbol that represents a smile from A-to-Z for the customers
and continues with product availability and variety along with lower prices to create and
deliver value (Zenger, 2013).
COMPREHENSIVE EXAM – AAGSBSV – FALL 3
Books as a means of customercentricism & Innovation
Having started as a bookseller, Amazon remains a leader in selling all sorts of books in
spite of having drifted into other products. Bezos indicates that books have huge items in
the book market compared to other items in any given products. And as huge titles of books
do emerge, they can be sorted, searched and organized by computers. He further stresses
that the customer proposition is only done online. The internet has a huge category of
books, in contrast to the physical world (Hof, 2002). In addition, Amazon claims that books
are:
Easy for Amazon to ship
Provide basic information enabling them to sale on online storefronts with the
information which may be in the form of
Chapters
Table of contents
Editorial
Customer reviews (Krishnamurthy,
2002).
On the other hand, Amazon added maximum value to the inefficient arrangement of the
publishing industry in America. In the 1990s, the industry had;
Concentrated on supply-publishers, printers and wholesalers.
There was no key player on the retail position. Even the Barnes & Noble had as
little as 11% of the American market.
Publishers had guaranteed the sales of books, yet retailers could return a book
not sold within the defined time frame.
The business was unpredictable especially with the lack of stability on the sales.
The retailers had a fixed cost for displaying the product in a brick and mortar
environment. (Krishnamurthy, 2002).
The major competitor to Amazon in the book market was from Brick-and-clicks stores.
These included BN.com and Barnes & Noble. Before Amazon came into being, BN.com
had a number of competitive advantages ranging from, superior recognition of the Barnes
& Noble brand name, to cross-marketing, co-promotion and customer acquisition
COMPREHENSIVE EXAM – AAGSBSV – FALL 4
programmers' both in the US and Europe. But come July 1995, Amazon trashed all these
market advantages by enabling customers to browse over 4.5 million titles from their
computers. This was a fantastic wave of success in E-commerce (Modi et all, 2000).

Amazon’s complete dominance in the book business online came very clearly by the
capitulation of Boarders. Amazon went on to create an alliance with the rival Borders. And
borders battled in vain to match a website competitive with Amazon. And eventually,
borders had to release its employees and Amazon front ended its online book market to this
day (Hof, 1998).
Music
In June 1998, Amazon ventured into the music selling followed by DVDs and Videos in
the same year. The very beginning in the music business, Amazon enjoyed a $14.4 million
profits. One of the reasons for Amazon’s shift in its products especially into music may
have been that the company had already established closeness with the customers with
books. And leading them into another product like music was easy (Hansell, 2001). The
other argument for the huge shift is that directing its attention into a variety of products
would enable the company to be a dominant retailer. Besides, it did become a very

COMPREHENSIVE EXAM – AAGSBSV – FALL 5

dominant retailer (Krishnamurthy, 2001). Amazon has amassed 132% profit in books,
Music, and DVD sales between 2004 and 2011 (16% in 2011 alone).
Growth Abroad
Amazon now serves well over 152 countries worldwide. However, Amazon.com is the
only bookseller in the world’s top 500 websites. According to one market analyst report,
"Amazon.com is estimated to have over 80% of the online bookstore market" (Modi et al,
2000: XI). As early as 1995 Amazon customers ranged from 45 different countries. With
a global market at heart, Amazon launched one of the earliest sites in Germany and the
UK. All the individual market’s focus has been books, Music and videos. In England alone,
Amazon UK has call centers in Brogborough, Bedfordshire, Peterborough, Don Caster,
and Hemel Hempstead.
A company can follow one or more of three generic strategies: cost leadership,
differentiation or focus (Porter, 1985). Similarly, Amazon.com has a vision to provide wide
variety of products and fulfilment services along with the affordable prices that requires
achieving economy of scope and economies of scale along with customer happiness.
Moreover, Jeff Bezos’s famous sketch illustrates Amazon’s main business strategy as the
growth strategy in Figure 2 based on Amazon.com’s virtuous cycle as well as data is the
king approach in Figure 3 by building network-effect.

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Figure 4 is created to show that Amazon.com’s value chain drives to provide low prices
and extraordinary customer experience which differentiates Amazon.com by creating
loyalty and unique competitive edge amongst the competitors (Porter, 1980; 1985).
Amazon also boosts customer’s experiences along with its Amazon Prime retention
program that also enables personalized services which are extensively valued by all ‘the
Amazonians’ (Chaffey,2018).
As Amazon grew, its share price growth enabled partnership or acquisition with a range of
companies in different sectors. Marcus (2004) described how Amazon partnered with
Drugstore.com (pharmacy), Living.com (furniture), Pets.com (pet supplies),
Wineshopper.com (wines), HomeGrocer.com (groceries), Sothebys.com (auctions) and
Kozmo.com (urban home delivery). In most cases, Amazon purchased an equity stake in
these partners, so that it would share in their prosperity. It also charged them fees for
placements on the Amazon site to promote and drive traffic to their sites. Similarly,
Amazon charged publishers for prime-position to promote books on its site which caused
an initial hue-and-cry, but this abated when it was realized that paying for prominent
placements was widespread in traditional booksellers and supermarkets. Many of these
new online companies failed in 1999 and 2000, but Amazon had covered the potential for
growth and was not pulled down by these partners, even though for some such as Pets.com
it had an investment of 50%.

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In Figure 4, technology stream has important role to drive and enable Amazon.com’s
business strategies. For example, Amazon.com’s ‘efficient in-house computing cloud’ is
initially innovated for the purpose of manage Amazon.com’s own business operations as a
cloud service (Schreiber, 2016). In a short term it has been formed as Amazon Web
Services (AWS) tech stack, smartly shifted out and enhanced to serve through a B2B and
B2C customers as a service by optimizing their IT Infrastructure operating costs and by
creating new revenue stream.
Likewise, Fulfilment by Amazon which mainly uses robotic fulfilment systems to reduce
idle time and maximise the operation efficiency by cutting operating costs by circa 20%
that would translate to approximately $22Mn in cost savings for each fulfilment center
regarding Amazon exec Dave-Clark (Kim,2016). Also, Kindle Direct Publishing ‘KDP’
which helps to authors to publish and sell their books in a minute (Schreiber, 2016).
“Christopher Tholen, the Chief Technology Officer of BandPage. His comments about how
AWS helps with the critical need to scale compute capacity quickly and reliably are not

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hypothetical: BandPage now helps 500,000 bands and artists connect with tens of millions
of fans. (Amazon.com Annual Shareholder Letter, 2011)”
As we have seen above the sentences Amazon.com has good sense of technology usage to
drive its business strategy by making happy its customers and by achieving economy of
scope and scale. Furthermore, Amazon.com highlights primary competitive factors as
selection, price, and convenience, including fast and reliable fulfilment in the retail
industry. Therefore, these competitive factors match with the key factors that drive
customer to shop from Amazon.com that are highlighted in Figure 5. Evidently, we can
say that Amazon.com knows its customers better than them based on its experience curve
and knowledge systems which will be detailed following sections.

Furthermore, in its 2017 Annual Report, Amazon.com (2017) defines its competitors in a
very large spectrum from online/offline retailers, fulfilment services providers, telecom
and technology producers to digital content, media producers and publishers (SEC, 2015;
2017). Regarding above the business strategies and competitors statement of Amazon.com,
it is very clear, Amazon.com has a strategy about not only become an online and offline
retail giant but also become a leader across the industries such as web search, telecom,
technology and logistics services & platform provider, electronic devices, digital

COMPREHENSIVE EXAM – AAGSBSV – FALL 9

marketing, digital media and content producer by beating its competitors such as Wal Mart,
Google, Netflix, Microsoft, Apple and so forth.
Finally, innovation have transformed the retail industry and redefined its business models.
Amazon disrupted the retail industry by its digital transformation and became the online
marketplace top of the list with an existence in 58 countries and with 1,216,306,113 online
populations. Amazon primarily dominates North America and Europe, but is making its
way into the Middle East. Amazon has completed its acquisition of e-commerce firm
Souq.com, which was first announced at the end of March and sees the U.S. retail giant
enter the Middle Eastern market. Amazon paid $580 million in cash for Souq. The
Souq.com deal gives Amazon a firm footing in a growing and competitive e-commerce
space. Souq.com itself claims over 45 million visitors per month and a range of 8.4 million
products across 31 categories. The region itself covers a total of some 50 million consumers
across several countries. At the time of its confirmation, the deal was seen as an indicator
that Amazon is prepared to buy its way into growth and new markets rather than simply
relying on developing and expanding its own business.

Organizational Strategy

Amazon.com organizational structure has been carefully designed to execute better than
competitors and to achieve a sustainable competitive advantage by using its highly skilled
and talented C-Level, management and specialist teams as a valuable and rare resources
that are enabled and influenced by internet and information technology stack such as EC2
(compute capacity) and S3 (file storage) (Schreiber, 2016; Agarwal, 2014; Rivet, 2017).
Regarding recent McKinsey research technology-enabled solutions let firms to engage vast
number of employees across the countries in the restructure effort in real-time, while
recognizing the budget and other effects of possible modifications (Aronowitz et al., 2015).
That is why Amazon.com has mostly operations management, product development, R&D,
technology and HR teams which are organized regarding the specific areas and
technologies, instead of front office sales teams or cashiers on contrary to classical retailers.
Even in its Amazon Go physical store that has been testing and there is no sales staff in it

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all shelves and check out are controlled by smart systems such as beacons & RFID sensors,
smartphones and cameras that sort of technology may affect and shape Amazon.com’s
WholeFoods store retail operations and sales organizations at the near feature as Holland
and Lockett (1992) call attention that technology implementation requires organizational
change (Rey, 2017).

By doing so, Amazon.com maximizes efficiency of processes, operations and fulfilment

centers, featured services and provides outstanding products along with vertically
integrated huge number of supplier ecosystem amongst the world (Izogo and Ozo, 2011).
Euromonitor (2017) highlights “Amazon has never ignored international markets” and it
has huge foot print many of the big markets. Since current market is considered by
globalization and raising economic fusion, as Tabares et al. (2015) pointed out that in the
highly competitive market, how firms such as Amazon.com begin to operate successfully
in the foreign international markets by using leverage of internet, information and
communication technologies as well as by building set of distinctive intangible assets along
with other key competences. Therefore, these intangible assets later are named intellectual
assets and it is divided into human resources (the employees' skills and attitudes for
problem solving & management), information assets (organizational ‘culture, values,
management styles’ and technological assets ‘R&D, product technologies, patent &
commercial secrets, competitive intel’) and relationship skill (relational) assets (Tabares et
al., 2015). In Table 2, Amazon.com fosters its intellectual asset through the human
resources at an individual and organizational level by enabling all employees and entire
value chain (see Figure 4) with its information assets like AWS Customer relationship
Management (CRM), automated and optimised supply chain and warehouse processes and
equipment (Kiva Robotics) through a strong organizational culture and through the
innovation and technological processes, products and services such as 1-Click Payment,
Drone shipment, Dash Buttons, Alexa AI.

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 Table 2

Amazon.com encourages its relationship skills through a strong network relation with the
stakeholders will create valuable, unique, rare and non-substitutable products and goods
that is likely to secure sustainable competitive advantage in global markets a part of
Amazon.com’s internalisation strategy. In terms of value creation and sustainability
segments in Table 2, Value is assessed as high, rarity mostly medium. Imitation,
substitution and transferable are assessed as mostly difficult and medium for information
assets, capability and relationship skills since Amazon.com has achieved economies of
scale & scope and its entire value chain enabled by internet, innovation & technology.
Moreover, it seems like every firm has an IT structure and easy to imitate, however it is
not as Holland and Lockett (1992) pointed out that creating massive technology stack is
really hard. If we consider Amazon.com’s AWS, machine learning and data processing
infrastructure along with its experience curve, building that type in environment will never
be easy except a few big firms such as Google, Apple and Facebook.

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Amazon.com’s IS & Digital Strategies
Amazon’s founding strategy that digital commerce will radically reshape our marketplace
based on Jeff Bezos’ three ideas and some highlights from their results as follows
(Fabernovel, 2013):
i. Digital enables limitless inventory (Diversification Strategy),
o Amazon has a total of 573 million products on sale on its platform in 10+
segment as of Nov 2017
ii. Digital boosts customer care (Retention Strategy),
o for the ninth consecutive year, Customers Rank Amazon #1 in Customer
Satisfaction (Foresee Experience Index) (Amazon.com, no date)
iii. Digital allows high margin, lowest prices
o Internet, AWS, KIVA Robotic Fulfilment, Digital Content and Services support
to achieve economy scope and scale by reducing cost and increasing selection

These ideas also shape Amazon.com’s digital strategies and highlights firm’s vision at the
meta level. Furthermore, Figure 6 shows strategy triangle of Amazon.com and which
digital major strategies complements to the Amazon.com’s business and organizational
strategies based on previous content in this paper (Holland and Lockett, 1992).

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Elert et al (2017) call attention that firm’s sustainable growth differs based on its ability to
exploit innovations in its routine. Complementary view of Pisano (2015) emphasizes that
distinctive type of innovations can be complement for existing products that can contribute
others. Similarly, innovative technologies help Amazon’s growth strategy by designing
complementarities amongst to its devices and services that are enabled by technology for
instance an Amazon Prime customer can prefer Echo in order to shop from Amazon.com
by using Alexa voice assistant or customers can prefer to pay more for a witty delivery by
choosing drone shipment. Following Figure 7 shows Amazon.com’s share of technology
& content expenses compare to other operating expenses.

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 Figure 7: Share of Amazon Operating Expenses by Category

Therefore, its $16.1B Research & Development and technology investment of

Amazon.com has boosted it through at the top of the giants’ league amongst the tech giants
(Molla, 2017, Fastcompany.com, 2017). That evidence also shows how digital strategies
and investments are important. As an industry, retail and supply chain is suitable for
technology-driven disruption. And no firm is greater at distributive innovation and
technology to spread borders than Amazon.com (Schreiber, 2016). Furthermore, Table 3
is created to show that how Amazon.com is changing the way of shopping and lock in their
customers by using innovative technology and products.

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 Table 3

Amazon-as-a-Service Let’s move on how this tech investment fosters Amazon.com’s

growth and competitive digital strategy through the way from outsourced services, internal
capability and self-realization and providing 3rd party services as a platform such as AWS,
KDP, Fulfilment by Amazon, Digital Content (Amazon Studios) (see Figure 8). That also
classifies maturity of Amazon.com’s technology as IT Business Partner which is at the top-
level (3rd) maturity regarding the Merlyn’s (no date) IT maturity model.

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Amazon.com transforms physical retail in exactly the same way how it renovated the In-
house IT Infrastructure to AWS (EC2, S3) by inventing new services and products and
using technology (Schreiber, 2016; Sarkar, 2016). Amazon.com has knowledge
management (KM) system that provides an advanced level and amount of data to feed its
CRM system to connect and understand its customers as a key activity by tracking real-
time customers behavioral and transactional data on the site as well as understanding the
causes of cart abandonment rate along with the behavioral patterns of customer (Frow et-
al., 2011; Kotler& Keller, 2016). Consequently, Amazon.com is able to create customized
and personalized content and experience for its customers to keep existing customer happy
instead of spending too much money to attract new customers by maximizing customer life
time value (Kotler& Keller, 2016).

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It follows that the Amazon technology infrastructure must readily support this culture of
experimentation and this can be difficult to be achieved with standardized content
management. Amazon has achieved its competitive advantage through developing its
technology internally and with a significant investment in this, which may not be available
to other organizations without the right focus on the online channels.
Round (2004) described the technology approach as ‘distributed development and
deployment’. Pages such as the home page have a number of content ‘pods’ or ‘slots’ which
call web services for features. This makes it relatively easy to change the content in these
pods and even change the location of the pods on-screen. Amazon uses a flowable or fluid
page design unlike many sites which enables it to make the most of real-estate on-screen.
Technology also supports more standard e-retail facilities. SEC (2005) states: ‘We use a
set of applications for accepting and validating customer orders, placing and tracking
orders with suppliers, managing and assigning inventory to customer orders, and ensuring
proper shipment of products to customers. Our transaction-processing systems handle
millions of items, a number of different status inquiries, multiple shipping addresses, gift-
wrapping requests, and multiple shipment methods. These systems allow the customer to
choose whether to receive single or several shipments based on availability and to track the
progress of each order. These applications also manage the process of accepting,
authorizing, and charging customer credit cards.’Governmental regulation and Legal
uncertainties.
Currently, Amazon.com faces common business laws and regulations or regulations
regarding access to online commerce in addition to taxation laws. For instance, expanding
company's services distribution center network might result in additional sales and other
tax obligations. Regulatory authorities may implement particular regulations and laws
governing the online commerce or Internet. These regulations may cover pricing,
copyrights, taxation, user privacy, content, distribution and features as well as quality of
services and products. Changes in buyer protection laws furthermore may enforce
additional burdens on enterprises conducting business online. These regulations or laws
might impede the growing of the Internet or other online services. This could, in turn,

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reduce the request for Amazon's services and products in addition to increase Amazon's
cost of doing business. Additionally, it is not clear how existing laws governing issues for
instance sales and other taxes, property ownership, libel and personal privacy apply to the
Internet and online commerce. Disapproving resolution of these issues may harm Amazon's
business.

Conclusion
Amazon has become a house-hold name in both books and music industries. Its position
among small competitors is way ahead. The company’s ability cannot be doubted in both
books and music selling for years to come. Amazon has successfully expanded and hugely
profitable due to the provision of the best E-commerce ever, the knowledge of its customers
and the longevity of the relationships with its customers. And these three aspects will
undoubtedly keep Amazon afloat and remain a dominant retailer regardless of the threats
from its competitors.
For the smaller firms, the road may be rough and unpleasant to keep up with Amazon. To
remain on the market, they will have to re-invent themselves by providing E-retail equal to
the competitive market. Without it, success for them remains on the horizon. They will also
need to identify their customers and be able to keep them as long as possible to enable
consistence.
This experience provides some evidence to suggest that the leverage of innovative
technology provides advantages that are based on more knowledge of customers and
technology, than rivals and effective use of very skilled human capital. Amazon is the
model for eliminating waste and improving customer satisfaction simultaneously in every
step of its value chain. Constant innovation to disrupt the existing state and traditional ways
of doing business, Amazon.com has been disrupting and dominating the retail and
‘Amazon-as-a-service’ (especially AWS, Fulfilment-by-Amazon) industries by innovating
and implementing the new technologies along with services and products way to serve the
Amazonians.
However, when it comes to brick& mortar retail such as WholeFoods operation may
require special care to gather specific information/data from physical and grocery stores to

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understand customers and to foster revenue by implementing Amazon-Go technology
and/or Prime loyalty program.
Another challenge can come with GDPR ‘General-Data-Protection-Rules’ which brings
strict data transparency and protection rules for the firms. GDPR may affect Amazon.com
knowledge management process and also make transparent its secret about data processing
for its competitors. Lastly, boosting penetration and presence of Alexa voice assistant along
with affordable connected devices by integrating it with smart home, car, entertainment
systems in the market can be another profitable revenue stream by using technology
(Euromonitor, 2017). So, Bricks& Mortar, GDPR and IoT alignment will be crucial to
sustain its growth and dynamism to develop new innovations to move one step beyond of
its competitors.
Case Questions

After reading this case well and building on what you have already prepared and revised
that covered the main objectives of the MBA program that you are about to finish, provide
a relevant and consistent answers for the under listed questions.

Question 1. Discuss Amazon international expansion strategies to bring its model of low
prices, vast selection, and fast delivery to the world through building an online presence
across different geographies.

Question 2. Analyze the different Marketing orientations adopted by Amazon to satisfy

and retain its customers and analyze Amazon's main growth, diversification and digital
marketing strategies.

Question 3. Intellectual capital has become the main element in the processes of
innovation, change and creativity, thus creating a competitive advantage for Amazon.
Accordingly, whenever Amazon is able to assess its intellectual capital well, it will be
able to achieve its goals and make decisions related to the re-engineering of its programs,
which leads to be more efficient, profitable and competitive whether on the quality of the
product or service or cost and price or any other excellence strategies.

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Q: Discuss the role of the Intellectual Capital (IC) in achieving the competitive
advantage of Amazon

Question 4. Assess for the strategic management actions of the company during the last five
years from 2013 to 2018 and give your evaluation, in terms of: what was strategically right?
And what was the strategically wrong?

Question 5. Assess for the company strategic management during the COVD 19 pandemic: What
were the strategic action taken? How do you evaluate these decision? And do you have further
recommendations?

Question 6. The following is a table (1) that summarizes some selected financial ratios
of Amazon Company for the five recent years from 2014 till 2018.

Table (1) Amazon Selected Financial Ratios

Selected Financial Ratios 2018 2017 2016 2015 2014

Current ratio 1.0981 1.04 1.0448 1.0536 1.1153

Long-term Debt / Capital 0.3504 0.4714 0.2852 0.3807 0.4349

Debt / Equity Ratio 0.5359 0.893 0.399 0.6146 0.7695

Gross Margin 40.2474 37.0684 35.0684 35.0931 33.0402

Operating Margin 5.3335 2.3085 3.0782 2.0868 0.2

Pre-Tax Profit Margin 4.8345 2.1398 2.862 1.4653 -0.1247

Net Profit Margin 4.3253 1.7052 1.7435 0.557 -0.2708

Total Assets Turnover 1.4318 1.3546 1.6305 1.6527 1.6327

Inventory Turnover Ratio 8.1027 6.9745 7.7013 6.9951 7.5614

Receivable Turnover 13.9646 13.5116 16.3074 18.9257 15.8567

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 Days Sales in Receivables 26.1376 27.0139 22.3826 19.2859 23.0186

ROE – Return on Equity 23.1303 10.9459 12.2945 4.4531 -2.2437

ROA – Return On Assets 6.1931 2.3098 2.8429 0.9205 -0.4422

ROI – Return On Investment 15.0245 5.7824 8.7883 2.7579 -1.268

Operating Cash Flow Per Share 24.1945 1.7081 10.3044 10.4295 3.0353

Free Cash Flow Per Share 21.9501 -4.7741 6.0055 11.3999 11.3999

P/E Ratio 74.61 190.16 152.71 545.07 0.00

Q: Given some selected financial ratios of Amazon Company, Analyze different

dimensions of Amazon’s financial health along with the recommendations about its
major strengths and weaknesses. [Don’t limit your analysis to only a description of what
has increased or what has decreased without providing the meaning/analysis of that].

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 Citation using APA style

A Work by Two Authors

Name both authors in the signal phrase or in parentheses each time you cite the work. Use
the word "and" between the authors' names within the text and use the ampersand in
parentheses.
Example: Research by Wegener and Petty (1994) supports...
(Wegener & Petty, 1994)

A Work by Three or More Authors

List only the first author’s name followed by “et al.” in every citation, even the first, unless
doing so would create ambiguity between different sources.
Example: (Kernis et al., 1993)
Kernis et al. (1993) suggest...

Unknown Author
If the work does not have an author, cite the source by its title in the signal phrase or use
the first word or two in the parentheses. Titles of books and reports are italicized; titles of
articles, chapters, and web pages are in quotation marks. APA style calls for capitalizing
important words in titles when they are written in the text (but not when they are written in
reference lists).
Example: A similar study was done of students learning to format research papers
("Using Citations," 2001).

Organization as an Author
If the author is an organization or a government agency, mention the organization in the
signal phrase or in the parenthetical citation the first time you cite the source, just as you
would an individual person.
Example: According to the American Psychological Association (2000),...

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Webpage or Piece of Online Content
Individual webpages and documents hosted online are cited similarly to print content. Note,
however, that the URL is typically included at the end of the entry. The URL may, at the
author's discretion, be left as an active link. Include additional information (like translators,
editors, first edition publication date, and so on) as you would for print sources.

Example: Author, A. A. & Author B. B. (Date of publication). Title of page [Format

description when necessary]. Retrieved from https://www.someaddress.com/full/url/

Example: Eco, U. (2015). How to write a thesis [PDF file]. (Farina C. M. & Farina
F., Trans.) Retrieved from retrieved
https://www.researchgate.net/...How_to_write_a_thesis/.../Umberto+Eco-
How+to+Write+... (Original work published 1977).

Basic Format for Books

Example: Author, A. A. (Year of publication). Title of work: Capital letter also for
subtitle. Location: Publisher.

Note: For "Location," you should always list the city and the state using the two
letter postal abbreviation without periods (New York, NY).

Example: Calfee, R. C., & Valencia, R. R. (1991). APA guide to preparing

manuscripts for journal publication. Washington, DC: American Psychological
Association.

Magazine article:
Swedin, E. G. (2006, May/June). Designing babies: A eugenics race with China?
The Futurist, 40, 18-21.

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Example: Will, G. F. (2004, July 5). Waging war on Wal-Mart. Newsweek, 144, 64.

Duhigg, C. (2019, October 10). Is Amazon unstoppable? The New Yorker.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/10/21/is-amazon-unstoppable

Newspaper article:
Dougherty, R. (2006, January 11). Jury convicts man in drunk driving death.
Centre Daily Times, p. 1A.

Laber-Warren, E. (2019, October 17). You're only as old as you feel. The New York
Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/17/well/mind/age-subjective-feeling-
old.html

Scholarly journal article:

Blattner, J., & Bacigalupo, A. (2007). Using emotional intelligence to develop
executive leadership and team and organizational development. Consulting
Psychology Journal: Practice and Research, 59(3), 209-219.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/1065-9293.59.3.209

Book Review:

Rifkind, D. (2005, April 10). Breaking their vows. [Review of the book The mermaid
chair, by S.M. Kidd]. Washington Post, p. T6.

Dissertation Abstract
Yoshida, Y. (2001). Essays in urban transportation. Dissertation Abstracts
International, 62, 7741A.

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Dissertation, Published
Lastname, F. N. (Year). Title of dissertation (Doctoral dissertation). Retrieved from
Name of database. (Accession or Order Number)

Dissertation, Unpublished
Lastname, F. N. (Year). Title of dissertation (Unpublished doctoral dissertation).
Name of Institution, Location.

Government Document
National Institute of Mental Health. (1990). Clinical training in serious mental
illness (DHHS Publication No. ADM 90-1679). Washington, DC: U.S. Government
Printing Office.

Report From a Private Organization

American Psychiatric Association. (2000). Practice guidelines for the treatment of
patients with eating disorders (2nd ed.). Washington, DC: Author.

Conference Proceedings
Schnase, J. L., & Cunnius, E. L. (Eds.). (1995). Proceedings from CSCL '95: The
First International Conference on Computer Support for Collaborative Learning.
Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Tables
(Taken from the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, 6th
ed., Section 5.19)

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