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Chapter 438 The Importance of Alexa

In a conference room at Amazon headquarters, Bezos stood in front of a whiteboard, holding a red marker, the tip of which traced undulating curves on the whiteboard.

He lowered his head slightly, his gaze focused intently on the whiteboard, but the corners of his mouth involuntarily turned up, forming a distinct arc. His undisguised pleasure was obvious to everyone.

"I thought the meeting would be postponed. Are you really going to be interviewed by Time magazine dressed like that?"

This is why Bezos couldn't suppress his smile; in less than two hours, one of the world's most influential magazines, Time, would send someone to Amazon's headquarters to interview this outstanding entrepreneur.

Being featured in Time magazine means he has become a representative figure in a certain field, but what he values ​​more is that he appeared in the magazine before some annoying guy.

Whether or not Time magazine invited him and he declined was not within his consideration.

"Why dress up? We're an internet company, not some old-fashioned bunch of stubborn folks." Bezos looked up, his blue eyes gleaming with excitement, and his smile widening.

"Individuality is the truest reflection of our industry."

Many people in the meeting room smiled, but behind those smiles lay a mixture of flattery and barely perceptible pretense.

Even Bezos himself may not realize that the philosophy he is expounding is unconsciously imitating the guy he often finds annoying.

This concept of dressing simply, casually, and comfortably for important occasions and when facing the media, rather than the traditional suits and ties, originated with Ernst.

Now, the entire Silicon Valley is following suit, making it a trend in the tech industry. Even Steve Jobs took off his suit at an Apple event, put on a comfortable T-shirt, and paired it with jeans and white sneakers.

After a brief and relaxed exchange, Bezos finished drawing the strategic model on the whiteboard, turned around, and slammed his red marker heavily on the whiteboard. "Alexa's Toolbar is like installing a probe in every user's browser."

The curve he drew is a composite model created by Amazon based on data provided by Alexa, showing user traffic trends, category sales forecasts, and market competition patterns.

"With this traffic data, we can accurately predict the sales peak of any product category, which is more effective than hiring a thousand market analysts."

This is why Amazon acquired Alexa. With Alexa's data, not only is a lot of manpower saved, but more importantly, a large amount of data can be obtained instantly, which is of great help to Amazon.

In the internet age, data is like industrial oil, and for Amazon, which is committed to expanding into multiple product categories, high-quality user data is an indispensable strategic resource.

While Amazon also has its own data collection tools that can perform preliminary data collection and analysis on user behavior data within the platform, it lags far behind Alexa in terms of data coverage, collection efficiency, and commercial conversion capabilities.

Alexa can be embedded in mainstream browsers to collect detailed data such as users' browsing history, search keywords, and dwell time in real time, while Amazon only targets users within Amazon. In terms of scale and reference value, Alexa cannot be compared with Amazon.

Chief Strategy Officer Blackburn adjusted his glasses and opened the thick research report in front of him. "The technology team has assessed that their web crawler system can crawl 1500 million web pages per day, which is at least 8 times faster than our own developed tools."

Blackburn, as chief strategy officer, knew very well that if Amazon only focused on the book sector, its own data collection tools would be more than sufficient.

However, Amazon's current strategy is to expand across all product categories. Without more detailed data to support it, such expansion would just be blindly burning money.

Despite the current stable development of everyone, Amazon's top management knows that once Ernst's e-commerce website goes live, online shopping will be a losing proposition.

Both Amazon and Ernst will likely work together to clear out the online websites of traditional retail giants first.

Within half a month, in addition to Walmart, retail giants from various fields such as Best Buy and Home Depot have launched their own online stores.

Even many local department stores have followed Walmart's example and launched their own online platforms.

In media parlance, the era of chaotic e-commerce has arrived.

In this context, whoever can obtain accurate market data earlier will gain the upper hand in this elimination round, and Alexa's data analysis capabilities are undoubtedly the key to Amazon's victory in this competition.

"Tell Carly Brewster that if Alexa agrees to a full-stock acquisition, we can raise our offer to $220 million," Bezos's voice rang out again, his gaze resolute, his blue eyes gleaming with ambition.

Amazon's initial offer was $170 million, but this time it has been increased by $50 million, demonstrating Bezos's emphasis on and urgency in acquiring Alexa.

On the one hand, he hoped the other party would agree to a full-equity acquisition, which would minimize Amazon's cash flow expenditure.

Another benefit is that it aligns the interests of the Alexa team with those of Amazon, thus motivating them to work more diligently in the future.

Finally, he was afraid that things might change and things could go wrong if he waited too long.

For some reason, he has been feeling irritable these past two days, as if something bad is going to happen.

"There are two main obstacles to acquiring Alexa right now. First, Brewster wants Alexa to operate and be managed independently. This conflict with our plan to integrate them into the Amazon ecosystem," Blackburn explained the obstacles to the acquisition.

"Say yes." Bezos responded almost without hesitation.

For Alexa, the most important thing about acquiring this company is the data; who manages it and how it's managed are irrelevant to Bezos.

Once Alexa is successfully acquired and incorporated into Amazon's portfolio, there will always be opportunities to gradually achieve full control over Alexa through business integration, strategic adjustments, and other means.

To paraphrase something he often said to his executives in private: "Put the prey in the cage first, and there's plenty of time to tame it."

Blackburn nodded and continued his report, "Also, regarding Etoler, Saffra insists that Amazon's current valuation is too high and there is a huge bubble."

"Greed is insatiable; these people have greed ingrained in their very bones," Bezos scoffed.

"How much money has Etoler invested in Alexa? It doesn't even add up to $600 million."

"If we calculate based on the price of $220 million, Etoler's stake in Alexa is worth $65 million in Amazon stock. Even if the value of Amazon stock were to halve, their return would still be more than five times."

"A fivefold return in one year, and they're still not satisfied?"

The excuses like "I don't want stock" and "Amazon's stock price is inflated" are just that—excuses.

$6500 million worth of stock, while not a small amount, isn't an excessive one either.

As long as Etoler chooses to sell slowly on the market and doesn't dump shares, even if Amazon's stock price corrects, the losses won't be significant.

Besides, the internet sector is already skyrocketing. Even if there's a correction, Etole might regret selling now.

Besides, which internet company hasn't experienced a bubble?

In comparison, Amazon is definitely a high-quality company in the internet industry.

Ultimately, it's because Amazon was too hasty in its purchases, allowing Alexa and its backers to raise prices arbitrarily.

But that's the way business works, and Bezos can't do anything about it.

After a moment of contemplation, Bezos said with a resolute and decisive tone, "Tell Safra that if she really thinks Amazon's stock is overvalued, then we'll buy Etoler's Alexa shares in cash, but the price has to be lowered."

Looking up at Blackburn, who was in charge of the acquisition, he said, "This needs to be finalized before Amazon updates on September 1st."