According to estimates by various sources, the global e-commerce market was valued at between $2.5 and $3 trillion in 2023, more than the projected 2024 nominal gross domestic product in current prices of countries like Brazil, Italy, Canada or Russia. It is no surprise that many companies are looking to score a piece of the ever-increasing pie, which is set to expand to roughly $5 trillion per year by 2027. With an annual net income of $30 billion from revenues of $575 billion in 2023, Amazon can be considered the most important player in the market by a considerable margin. But just how wide is said margin?
As our chart analyzing business indicators of some of the biggest e-commerce companies between January and September 2023 shows, the lead of Andy Jassy's company is most pronounced in terms of revenue and market capitalization. The runner-ups in the former category, Chinese corporations Pinduoduo, which owns the upstart international marketplace Temu, and JD.com, generated only a quarter of Amazon's revenue in the first three quarters of 2023. Regarding market capitalization, the U.S.-based company is in a league of its own, with only four public companies exhibiting a higher market cap.
Looking at the net incomes of the analyzed e-commerce platforms, the differences are less drastic, at least in one case. Alibaba Group, the owner of Aliexpress, Taobao and Alibaba.com, had a net income of $11.4 billion in the first three quarters of 2023, half of what Amazon made in the same period. The other companies analyzed don't come close to Amazon's standing, with Japan-based Rakuten even being in the red to the tune of $1.4 billion.
Drilling down on where these companies make most of their money shows that the biggest players rely on specific markets or segments for their business success. Amazon's international platform business, for example, hasn't been profitable since 2022, recording quarterly losses between $100 million and $5.5 billion, while its cloud business with AWS now contributes the lion's share to the company's profit. Alibaba, on the other hand, recorded losses in almost every segment except its China commerce and cloud offerings.
One thing unites almost all of the analyzed corporations, though: After a less-than-successful 2022 due to a worldwide macroeconomic downturn caused in part by China's no-covid strategy and the war in Ukraine, most of the leading technology companies and, by extension, e-commerce platforms managed to bounce back in 2023. Amazon, for example, went from a net loss of $3 billion between January and September 2022 to a net income of $19.8 billion in the same period of 2023.
