Dear shareholders:

亲爱的股东们：

Over the past 25 years at Amazon, I’ve had the opportunity to write many narratives, emails, letters, and keynotes for employees, customers, and partners. But, this is the first time I’ve had the honor of writing our annual shareholder letter as CEO of Amazon. Jeff set the bar high on these letters, and I will try to keep them worth reading.

在过去25年的亚马逊生涯中，我有机会为员工、客户和合作伙伴撰写了许多叙事文、邮件、信件以及主题演讲稿。但这是我第一次有幸以亚马逊首席执行官的身份撰写我们的年度股东信。杰夫在这些信件上设立了很高的标准，我会努力使它们依然值得一读。

When the pandemic started in early 2020, few people thought it would be as expansive or long-running as it’s been. Whatever role Amazon played in the world up to that point became further magnified as most physical venues shut down for long periods of time and people spent their days at home. This meant that hundreds of millions of people relied on Amazon for PPE, food, clothing, and various other items that helped them navigate this unprecedented time. Businesses and governments also had to shift, practically overnight, from working with colleagues and technology on-premises to working remotely. AWS played a major role in enabling this business continuity. Whether companies saw extraordinary demand spikes, or demand diminish quickly with reduced external consumption, the cloud’s elasticity to scale capacity up and down quickly, as well as AWS’s unusually broad functionality helped millions of companies adjust to these difficult circumstances.

2020年初，当疫情爆发时，很少有人认为它会如此广泛或持久。此前亚马逊在全球所扮演的角色，随着大多数实体场所长期关闭、人们居家度日而被进一步放大。这意味着数亿人开始依赖亚马逊提供个人防护装备、食品、服装以及其他各种帮助他们度过这一前所未有时期的物品。企业和政府也不得不几乎在一夜之间，从依赖同事和现场技术，转向远程办公。AWS在保障业务连续性方面发挥了重要作用。无论是公司遭遇需求暴增，还是因外部消费减少而需求迅速下降，云计算灵活的容量调节能力以及AWS异常广泛的功能，帮助数以百万计的企业适应了这些艰难的环境。

Our AWS and Consumer businesses have had different demand trajectories during the pandemic. In the first year of the pandemic, AWS revenue continued to grow at a rapid clip—30% year over year (“YoY”) in 2020 on a $35 billion annual revenue base in 2019—but slower than the 37% YoY growth in 2019. This was due in part to the uncertainty and slowing demand that so many businesses encountered, but also in part to our helping companies optimize their AWS footprint to save money. Concurrently, companies were stepping back and determining what they wanted to change coming out of the pandemic. Many concluded that they didn’t want to continue managing their technology infrastructure themselves, and made the decision to accelerate their move to the cloud. This shift by so many companies (along with the economy recovering) helped re-accelerate AWS’s revenue growth to 37% YoY in 2021.

在疫情期间，我们的AWS业务和消费者业务经历了不同的需求轨迹。在疫情的第一年，AWS收入依然以惊人的速度增长——2020年实现了30%的同比增长（基于2019年350亿美元的年收入基础），但增速低于2019年37%的同比增长。这部分归因于许多企业面临的不确定性和需求放缓，同时也因为我们帮助企业优化了AWS使用以节省成本。与此同时，各家公司开始反思并决定在疫情后改变哪些方面。许多公司得出结论，不愿再自行管理技术基础设施，而决定加速向云端转移。如此众多公司的这一转变（再加上经济的复苏）促使AWS的收入增长在2021年重新加速至37%的同比增长。

Conversely, our Consumer revenue grew dramatically in 2020. In 2020, Amazon’s North America and International Consumer revenue grew 39% YoY on the very large 2019 revenue base of $245 billion; and, this extraordinary growth extended into 2021 with revenue increasing 43% YoY in Q1 2021. These are astounding numbers. We realized the equivalent of three years’ forecasted growth in about 15 months.

相反，我们的消费者收入在2020年大幅增长。2020年，亚马逊北美及国际消费者业务的收入在2019年2450亿美元的庞大基数上实现了39%的同比增长；这种惊人的增长势头在2021年延续，2021年第一季度收入同比增长达43%。这些数字令人震惊。我们在大约15个月内实现了相当于三年预测增长的成果。

As the world opened up again starting in late Q2 2021, and more people ventured out to eat, shop, and travel, consumer spending returned to being spread over many more entities. We weren’t sure what to expect in 2021, but the fact that we continued to grow at double digit rates (with a two-year Consumer compounded annual growth rate of 29%) was encouraging as customers appreciated the role Amazon played for them during the pandemic, and started using Amazon for a larger amount of their household purchases.

从2021年第二季度末开始，随着世界重新开放，越来越多的人外出就餐、购物和旅行，消费者支出开始分散到更多渠道。我们对2021年的预期并不明朗，但事实证明我们依然保持了两位数的增长（消费者业务两年复合年增长率达到29%），这令人鼓舞，因为客户感激亚马逊在疫情期间所扮演的角色，并开始将亚马逊作为更多家庭采购的选择。

This growth also created short-term logistics and cost challenges. We spent Amazon’s first 25 years building a very large fulfillment network, and then had to double it in the last 24 months to meet customer demand. As we were bringing this new capacity online, the labor market tightened considerably, making it challenging both to receive all of the inventory our vendors and sellers wanted to send us and to place that inventory as close to customers as we typically do. Combined with ocean, air, and trucking capacity becoming scarcer and more expensive, this created extra transportation and productivity costs. Supply chains were disrupted in ways none of us had seen previously. We hoped that the major impact from COVID-19 would recede as 2021 drew to a close, but then omicron reared its head in December, which had worldwide ramifications, including impacting people’s ability to work. And then in late February, with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, fuel costs and inflation became bigger issues with which to contend.

这种增长也带来了短期的物流和成本挑战。我们花费亚马逊前25年的时间构建了一个庞大的配送网络，而在过去24个月内，为了满足客户需求，我们不得不将该网络扩充一倍。随着新产能的上线，劳动力市场显著紧缩，使得接收供应商和销售商发来的所有库存以及将这些库存尽可能接近客户的工作都变得异常困难。再加上海运、空运和卡车运输能力日益稀缺且成本上升，这进一步增加了额外的运输和生产力成本。供应链遭遇了前所未有的中断。我们曾希望随着2021年的结束，COVID-19的主要影响会逐渐减弱，但12月奥密克戎变异株的出现产生了全球性影响，甚至影响了人们的工作能力。紧接着在2月下旬，随着俄罗斯入侵乌克兰，燃料成本和通胀问题变得更加严峻。

So, 2021 was a crazy and unpredictable year, continuing a trend from 2020. But, I’m proud of the incredible commitment and effort from our employees all over the world. I’m not sure any of us would have gotten through the pandemic the same way without the dedication and extraordinary efforts shown by our teams during this period, and I’m eternally grateful.  

2021年是疯狂而难以预测的一年，延续了2020年的趋势。但我为全球员工所展现出的非凡承诺和努力感到自豪。我不确定如果没有我们团队在这一期间展现出的奉献和非凡努力，我们中的任何人是否能够以同样的方式度过这场疫情，我对此永远心存感激。

It’s not normal for a company of any size to be able to respond to something as discontinuous and unpredictable as this pandemic turned out to be. What is it about Amazon that made it possible for us to do so? It’s because we weren’t starting from a standing start. We had been iterating on and remaking our fulfillment capabilities for nearly two decades. In every business we pursue, we’re constantly experimenting and inventing. We’re divinely discontented with customer experiences, whether they’re our own or not. We believe these customer experiences can always be better, and we strive to make customers’ lives better and easier every day. The beauty of this mission is that you never run out of runway; customers always want better, and our job is both to listen to their feedback and to imagine what else is possible and invent on their behalf.  

任何规模的公司都无法轻松应对如此断断续续且难以预测的疫情，这绝非常态。究竟是什么让亚马逊能够做到这一点？正因为我们并非从零开始。我们近二十年来一直在不断改进和重塑我们的配送能力。在我们所涉足的每一个业务领域，我们都在不断试验和创新。无论是我们的客户体验还是其他体验，我们始终对现状不满，坚信体验总能更好，我们每天都在努力让客户的生活变得更美好、更轻松。这一使命的美妙之处在于，前路永远无限；客户总是渴望更好，而我们的职责既是倾听他们的反馈，也要设想更多可能，并代表他们去创新。

People often assume that the game-changing inventions they admire just pop out of somebody’s head, a light bulb goes off, a team executes to that idea, and presto—you have a new invention that’s a breakaway success for a long time. That’s rarely, if ever, how it happens. One of the lesser known facts about innovative companies like Amazon is that they are relentlessly debating, re-defining, tinkering, iterating, and experimenting to take the seed of a big idea and make it into something that resonates with customers and meaningfully changes their customer experience over a long period of time.  

人们常常以为，他们所钦佩的那些改变游戏规则的发明会突然从某人的脑海中蹦出来，一个灵光闪现，团队便执行了这个想法，然后咻的一下——你就拥有了一项长期取得突破性成功的新发明。但事实很少如此发生。关于像亚马逊这样具有创新精神的公司的一个鲜为人知的事实是，它们不断地进行辩论、重新定义、不断修补、反复迭代和试验，将一个大创意的种子转化为能够引起客户共鸣并在长时间内切实改变客户体验的事物。

Let me give you some Amazon examples.  

让我举几个亚马逊的例子。

Our Fulfillment Network: Going back to the pandemic, there’s no way we could have started working on our fulfillment network in March 2020 and satisfied anything close to what our customers needed. We’d been innovating in our fulfillment network for 20 years, constantly trying to shorten the time to get items to customers. In the early 2000s, it took us an average of 18 hours to get an item through our fulfillment centers and on the right truck for shipment. Now, it takes us two. To deliver as reliably and cost-effectively as we desire, and to serve Amazon Prime members expecting shipments in a couple of days, we spent years building out an expansive set of fulfillment centers, a substantial logistics and transportation capability, and reconfigured how we did virtually everything in our facilities. For perspective, in 2004, we had seven fulfillment centers in the U.S. and four in other parts of the world, and we hadn’t yet added delivery stations, which connect our fulfillment and sortation centers to the last-mile delivery vans you see driving around your neighborhood. Fast forward to the end of 2021, we had 253 fulfillment centers, 110 sortation centers, and 467 delivery stations in North America, with an additional 157 fulfillment centers, 58 sortation centers, and 588 delivery stations across the globe. Our delivery network grew to more than 260,000 drivers worldwide, and our Amazon Air cargo fleet has more than 100 aircraft. This has represented a capital investment of over $100 billion and countless iterations and small process improvements by over a million Amazonians in the last decade and a half.  

我们的配送网络：回到疫情时期，2020年3月我们根本不可能从零开始着手建设我们的配送网络，以满足客户的需求。我们在配送网络方面已经创新了20年，不断缩短商品到达客户手中的时间。2000年代初，我们平均需要18个小时才能将一件商品从配送中心处理好并装上合适的运输车辆，而现在只需要2个小时。为了实现我们期望的可靠且高性价比的配送，并满足期望在几天内收到货物的亚马逊Prime会员，我们花费多年时间建设了庞大的配送中心网络、强大的物流和运输能力，并重新构建了我们在设施中几乎所有流程。举个例子，2004年，我们在美国拥有7个配送中心，在全球其他地区有4个，当时还未增加连接配送中心和分拣中心与最后一公里配送车辆的派送站。快进到2021年底，我们在北美拥有253个配送中心、110个分拣中心和467个派送站，全球范围内则增加到157个配送中心、58个分拣中心和588个派送站。我们的配送网络遍布全球，司机超过26万名，亚马逊航空货运机队拥有超过100架飞机。这代表了超过1000亿美元的资本投入，以及过去15年中由超过一百万名亚马逊员工不断进行的无数次迭代和小规模流程改进。

Ironically, just before COVID started, we’d made the decision to invest billions of incremental dollars over several years to deliver an increasing number of Prime shipments in one day. This initiative was slowed by the challenges of the pandemic, but we’ve since resumed our focus here. Delivering a substantial amount of shipments in one day is hard (especially across the millions of items that we offer) and initially expensive as we build out the infrastructure to scale this efficiently. But, we believe our over 200 million Prime customers, who will tell you very clearly that faster is almost always better, will love this. So, this capability to ship millions of items within a couple days (and increasingly one day) was not from one aha moment and not developed in a year or two. It’s been hard-earned by putting ourselves in the shoes of our customers, knowing what they wanted, organizing Amazonians to work together to invent better solutions, and investing a large amount of financial and people resources over 20 years (often well in advance of when it would payout). This type of iterative innovation is never finished and has periodic peaks in investment years, but leads to better long-term customer experiences, customer loyalty, and returns for our shareholders.  

具有讽刺意味的是，就在COVID爆发前，我们决定在数年内增投数十亿美元，以实现一天内递送越来越多的Prime订单。虽然这一计划因疫情挑战而放缓，但我们随后重新聚焦于此。一天内递送大量订单非常困难（尤其是在我们提供的数百万种商品中），并且在初期建设高效扩展这一基础设施时成本较高。但我们相信，我们超过2亿的Prime客户会非常清楚地告诉你，更快的配送几乎总是更好的，因此他们一定会喜欢这一服务。因此，这种在几天内（甚至越来越多地在一天内）递送数百万件商品的能力，并非源自某个“灵光一现”的时刻，也不是一两年内开发出来的。它是通过将自己置于客户的角度、了解客户需求、组织亚马逊员工共同发明更优解决方案，以及在20年中大量投入财务和人力资源（往往在收益显现之前）艰苦奋斗的结果。这种迭代式创新永无止境，虽然在某些年份会有投资高峰，但它最终会带来更好的长期客户体验、更高的客户忠诚度以及为股东创造更大的回报。

AWS: As we were defining AWS and working backwards on the services we thought customers wanted, we kept triggering one of the biggest tensions in product development—where to draw the line on functionality in V1. One early meeting in particular—for our core compute service called Elastic Compute Cloud ("EC2")—was scheduled for an hour, and took three, as we animatedly debated whether we could launch a compute service without an accompanying persistent block storage companion (a form of network attached storage). Everybody agreed that having a persistent block store was important to a complete compute service; however, to have one ready would take an extra year. The question became could we offer customers a useful service where they could get meaningful value before we had all the features we thought they wanted? We decided that the initial launch of EC2 could be feature-poor if we also organized ourselves to listen to customers and iterate quickly. This approach works well if you indeed iterate quickly; but, is disastrous if you can’t. We launched EC2 in 2006 with one instance size, in one data center, in one region of the world, with Linux operating system instances only (no Windows), without monitoring, load balancing, auto-scaling, or yes, persistent storage. EC2 was an initial success, but nowhere near the multi-billion-dollar service it’s become until we added the missing capabilities listed above, and then some.  

AWS：在我们定义AWS并逆向设计我们认为客户需要的服务时，我们不断触发产品开发中最大的矛盾之一——即在V1中如何界定功能范围。特别是在一次早期会议上——关于我们核心计算服务“弹性计算云”（Elastic Compute Cloud，简称“EC2”）——原定一小时的会议延长到了三小时，我们热烈讨论是否可以在没有伴随的持久性块存储（即一种网络附加存储）的情况下推出计算服务。大家一致认为，拥有持久块存储对构成完整计算服务至关重要；然而，准备好这一功能则需要额外一年的时间。问题变成了，在没有实现所有我们认为客户所需功能之前，我们能否为客户提供一项具有实际价值的有用服务？我们决定，EC2的初始版本可以功能较少，只要我们组织好倾听客户反馈并迅速迭代。如果能够真正快速迭代，这种方法非常有效；但如果不能，就会造成灾难。我们于2006年推出了EC2，当时仅提供一种实例规格、一个数据中心、全球唯一的一个区域，只运行Linux操作系统实例（没有Windows），且没有监控、负载均衡、自动扩展，甚至没有持久存储。EC2初见成效，但远未达到如今多亿美元级服务的水平，直到我们加入了上述缺失的功能，甚至更多.

In the early days of AWS, people sometimes asked us why compute wouldn’t just be an undifferentiated commodity. But, there’s a lot more to compute than just a server. Customers want various flavors of compute (e.g. server configurations optimized for storage, memory, high-performance compute, graphics rendering, machine learning), multiple form factors (e.g. fixed instance sizes, portable containers, serverless functions), various sizes and optimizations of persistent storage, and a slew of networking capabilities. Then, there’s the CPU chip that runs in your compute. For many years, the industry had used Intel or AMDx86 processors. We have important partnerships with these companies, but realized that if we wanted to push price and performance further (as customers requested), we’d have to develop our own chips, too. Our first generalized chip was Graviton, which we announced in 2018. This helped a subset of customer workloads run more cost-effectively than prior options. But, it wasn’t until 2020, after taking the learnings from Graviton and innovating on a new chip, that we had something remarkable with our Graviton2 chip, which provides up to 40% better price-performance than the comparable latest generation x86 processors. Think about how much of an impact 40% improvement on compute is. Compute is used for every bit of technology. That’s a huge deal for customers. And, while Graviton2 has been a significant success thus far (48 of the top 50 AWS EC2 customers have already adopted it), the AWS Chips team was already learning from what customers said could be better, and announced Graviton3 this past December (offering a 25% improvement on top of Graviton2’s relative gains). The list of what we’ve invented and delivered for customers in EC2 (and AWS in general) is pretty mind-boggling, and this iterative approach to innovation has not only given customers much more functionality in AWS than they can find anywhere else (which is a significant differentiator), but also allowed us to arrive at the much more game-changing offering that AWS is today.  

在AWS早期，人们有时会问我们，为什么计算不干脆成为一种无差异的商品。但计算远不止是一台服务器。客户需要各种类型的计算（例如，针对存储、内存、高性能计算、图形渲染、机器学习等优化的服务器配置）、多种形态（例如，固定实例规格、便携容器、无服务器函数）、各种尺寸和优化的持久存储，以及一系列网络功能。除此之外，还有运行计算的CPU芯片。多年来，业界一直使用Intel或AMD的x86处理器。我们与这些公司建立了重要的合作关系，但我们意识到，如果想进一步推动价格和性能（正如客户所要求的），我们也必须开发自己的芯片。我们的第一款通用芯片是Graviton，于2018年发布。这使部分客户的工作负载比以往方案运行得更具成本效益。但直到2020年，在总结Graviton的经验并开发出新芯片后，我们才推出了令人瞩目的Graviton2芯片，其提供的价格性能比可比的最新一代x86处理器提高了高达40%。试想40%的计算改进会带来多大的影响。计算应用于每一项技术，这对客户而言意义重大。而且，尽管Graviton2迄今已取得显著成功（AWS EC2前50大客户中已有48家采用），AWS芯片团队已从客户的反馈中不断学习，并于去年12月宣布推出Graviton3（在Graviton2的基础上再提升25%）。我们在EC2（以及整体AWS）为客户发明和交付的产品清单令人瞠目结舌，这种迭代式创新不仅为客户提供了在其他地方找不到的更多AWS功能（这是一个重要的差异化优势），也使我们最终达到了如今AWS的颠覆性产品.

Devices: Our first foray into devices was the Kindle, released in 2007. It was not the most sophisticated industrial design (it was creamy white in color and the corners were uncomfortable for some people to hold), but revolutionary because it offered customers the ability to download any of over 90,000 books (now millions) in 60 seconds—and we got better and faster at building attractive designs. Shortly thereafter, we launched a tablet, and then a phone (with the distinguishing feature of having front-facing cameras and a gyroscope to give customers a dynamic perspective along with varied 3D experiences). The phone was unsuccessful, and though we determined we were probably too late to this party and directed these resources elsewhere, we hired some fantastic long-term builders and learned valuable lessons from this failure that have served us well in devices like Echo and FireTV.  

设备：我们首次进军设备领域是在2007年发布的Kindle。它在工业设计上并非最为精巧（呈奶油白色，且对某些人来说握持时角落不够舒适），但却具有革命性，因为它让客户能够在60秒内下载超过9万本书（如今则达数百万本），同时我们在打造更具吸引力的设计方面也变得更快、更出色。不久之后，我们推出了平板电脑，随后又推出了一款手机（其独特之处在于配备前置摄像头和陀螺仪，能够为客户提供动态视角以及多样化的3D体验）。这款手机未能获得成功，尽管我们意识到可能来得太晚，并将这些资源转向其他领域，但我们聘请了一些出色的长期建设者，并从这次失败中吸取了宝贵的教训，这些经验在Echo和FireTV等设备上得到了很好的应用.

When I think of the first Echo device—and what Alexa could do for customers at that point—it was noteworthy, yet so much less capable than what’s possible today. Today, there are hundreds of millions of Alexa-enabled devices out there (in homes, offices, cars, hotel rooms, Amazon Echo devices, and third-party manufacturer devices); you can listen to music—or watch videos now; you can control your lights and home automation; you can create routines like “Start My Day” where Alexa tells you the weather, your estimated commute time based on current traffic, then plays the news; you can easily order retail items on Amazon; you can get general or customized news, updates on sporting events and related stats—and we’re still quite early with respect to what Alexa and Alexa-related devices will do for customers. Our goal is for Alexa to be the world’s most helpful and resourceful personal assistant, who makes people’s lives meaningfully easier and better. We have a lot more inventing and iterating to go, but customers continue to indicate that we’re on the right path. We have several other devices at varying stages of evolution (e.g. Ring and Blink provide the leading digital home security solutions, Astro is a brand new home robot that we just launched in late 2021), but it’s safe to say that every one of our devices, whether you’re talking about Kindle, FireTV, Alexa/Echo, Ring, Blink, or Astro is an invention-in-process with a lot more coming that will keep improving customers’ lives.

当我回想起第一款Echo设备——以及当时Alexa能为客户带来什么时，的确令人印象深刻，但其功能远不及今天的可能性。如今，全球拥有数亿台支持Alexa的设备（分布在家庭、办公室、汽车、酒店房间、亚马逊Echo设备以及第三方厂商的设备中）；你可以听音乐——或者现在还能看视频；你可以控制家中的灯光和智能家居；你可以设定诸如“开启我的一天”这样的日常程序，让Alexa告知你天气情况、基于当前交通状况的预估通勤时间，然后播放新闻；你可以轻松在亚马逊上订购零售商品；你可以获取一般或定制的新闻，了解体育赛事及相关数据更新——而关于Alexa及相关设备未来能为客户带来什么，我们仍处于初期阶段。我们的目标是让Alexa成为全球最有帮助、最足智多谋的个人助理，实质性地让人们的生活变得更轻松、更美好。我们还有许多发明和迭代工作要做，但客户不断表明我们走在正确的道路上。无论是Kindle、FireTV、Alexa/Echo、Ring、Blink，还是最近在2021年底推出的全新家庭机器人Astro，每一款设备都只是不断改进中的发明，还有更多创新将陆续出现，持续改善客户的生活。

Prime Video: We started in 2006 with an offering called Amazon Unbox where customers could download about a thousand movies from major studios. This made sense as bandwidth was slower those days (it would take an hour to download a video). But, as bandwidth got much faster to people’s homes and mobile devices, along with the advent of connected TVs, streaming was going to be a much better customer solution, and we focused our efforts on streaming. In 2011, we started offering over 5,000 streaming movies and shows as part of customers’ Amazon Prime subscriptions. Initially, all of our content was produced by other studios and entertainment companies. These deals were expensive, country-specific, and only available to us for a limited period; so, to expand our options, we started creating our own original shows. Our early efforts included short-lived shows like Alpha House and Betas, before we had our first award-winning series in Transparent, and eventually created multi-year franchises in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, The Boys, Bosch, and Jack Ryan. Along the way, we’ve learned a lot about producing compelling entertainment with memorable moments and using machine learning and other inventive technology to provide a superior-quality streaming experience (with useful, relevant data about actors, TV shows, movies, music, or sports stats a click away in our unique X-Ray feature). You might have seen some of this in action in our recent new hit series, Reacher, and you’ll hopefully see it in our upcoming Lord of the Rings series launch (coming Labor Day 2022). We also expect that you’ll see this iterative invention when we launch Thursday Night Football, the NFL’s first weekly, prime time, streaming-only broadcast, airing exclusively on Prime Video starting in September 2022. Our agreement with the NFL is for 11 years, and we will work relentlessly over the next several years to reinvent the NFL viewing experience for football fans.  

Prime Video：我们始于2006年推出一项名为Amazon Unbox的服务，当时客户可以从主要制片厂下载大约一千部电影。这在当时是合理的，因为当时的带宽较慢（下载一个视频可能需要一小时）。但随着带宽大幅提升到家庭和移动设备，再加上联网电视的出现，流媒体成为一种更优的客户解决方案，我们便将重心转向流媒体服务。2011年，我们开始将超过5,000部流媒体电影和节目作为亚马逊Prime会员的一部分提供给客户。最初，我们的所有内容均由其他电影制片厂和娱乐公司制作。这些协议昂贵、具有国家特性，并且只在有限期限内对我们开放；因此，为了扩展选择，我们开始制作自己的原创节目。我们早期的尝试包括短命的节目如《Alpha House》和《Betas》，之后我们推出了首部获奖剧集《Transparent》，并最终创作了多年的系列剧，如《了不起的麦瑟尔夫人》、《The Boys》、《Bosch》和《Jack Ryan》。在此过程中，我们学到了很多关于制作引人入胜的娱乐内容、打造难忘瞬间，以及利用机器学习和其他创新技术提供卓越流媒体体验的经验（通过我们独特的X-Ray功能，可以一键获取有关演员、电视节目、电影、音乐或体育数据的有用且相关的信息）。你可能已经在我们近期热播剧《Reacher》中见识到了这一点，希望在即将于2022年劳动节推出的《指环王》系列中也能看到。我们还预计，在2022年9月开始独家在Prime Video播出的NFL首个每周黄金时段仅流媒体播放的节目《星期四夜橄榄球》上线时，你也会看到这种迭代式创新。我们与NFL的协议为期11年，未来几年我们将不懈努力，重新定义橄榄球迷的NFL观看体验.

This track record of frequent invention is not only why more sports entities are choosing to work with Prime Video, but also why so many large entertainment companies have become Prime Video Channels partners. Channels is a program that enables entertainment companies to leverage Prime Video’s unique technology and viewing experience, as well as its very large member base to offer monthly subscriptions to their content. Companies like Warner Bros. Discovery, Paramount, Starz, Corus Entertainment, and Globo have found that they’re driving substantial incremental membership and better customer experience through Channels. While there is so much progress in Prime Video from where we started, we have more invention in front of us in the next 15 years than the last 15—and our team is passionately committed to providing customers with the most expansive collection of compelling content anywhere in the world.  

这一频繁创新的记录不仅解释了为何越来越多的体育实体选择与Prime Video合作，也说明了为何如此多的大型娱乐公司成为了Prime Video Channels的合作伙伴。Channels是一个项目，使娱乐公司能够利用Prime Video独特的技术和观看体验，以及其庞大的会员基础，向客户提供内容月度订阅。华纳兄弟探索、派拉蒙、Starz、Corus Entertainment和Globo等公司发现，通过Channels，他们能够带来显著的新增会员并改善客户体验。虽然Prime Video自起步以来取得了巨大进展，但我们在未来15年内的创新将超过过去15年——我们的团队满怀激情，致力于为全球客户提供最丰富、最吸引人的内容集合.

This same sort of iterative invention can be applied to efforts supporting people and communities. Last summer, we added two new Leadership Principles: Strive to be Earth’s Best Employer and Success and Scale Bring Broad Responsibility. These concepts were always implicit at Amazon, but explicit Leadership Principles help us ask ourselves—and empower more Amazonians at all levels to ask—whether we’re living up to these principles.  

这种同样的迭代式创新同样适用于支持人们和社区的努力。去年夏天，我们新增了两项领导力原则：努力成为地球上最好的雇主，以及成功与规模带来广泛责任。这些理念在亚马逊一直隐含存在，但明确的领导力原则帮助我们自问——并赋能各级亚马逊员工自问——我们是否真正践行了这些原则.

For example, more than a million Amazonians work in our fulfillment network. In 2018, we championed the $15 minimum wage (which is more than double the federal minimum wage), but haven’t stopped there. We continued to increase compensation such that our average starting hourly salary is currently over $18. Along with this compensation, we offer very robust benefits, including full health insurance, a 401K plan, up to 20 weeks of parental leave, and full tuition coverage for associates who want to get a college education (whether they remain with us or not). We’re not close to being done in how we improve the lives of our employees. We’ve researched and created a list of what we believe are the top 100 employee experience pain points and are systematically solving them. We’re also passionate about further improving safety in our fulfillment network, with a focus on reducing strains, sprains, falls, and repetitive stress injuries. Our injury rates are sometimes misunderstood. We have operations jobs that fit both the "warehousing” and "courier and delivery” categories. In the last U.S. public numbers, our recordable incident rates were a little higher than the average of our warehousing peers (6.4 vs. 5.5), and a little lower than the average of our courier and delivery peers (7.6 vs. 9.1). This makes us about average relative to peers, but we don’t seek to be average. We want to be best in class. When I first started in my new role, I spent significant time in our fulfillment centers and with our safety team, and hoped there might be a silver bullet that could change the numbers quickly. I didn’t find that. At our scale (we hired over 300,000 people in 2021 alone, many of whom were new to this sort of work and needed training), it takes rigorous analysis, thoughtful problem-solving, and a willingness to invent to get to where you want. We’ve been dissecting every process path to discern how we can further improve. We have a variety of programs in flight (e.g. rotational programs that help employees avoid spending too much time doing the same repetitive motions, wearables that prompt employees when they’re moving in a dangerous way, improved shoes to provide better toe protection, training programs on body mechanics, wellness, and safety practices). But, we still have a ways to go, and we’ll approach it like we do other customer experiences—we’ll keep learning, inventing, and iterating until we have more transformational results. We won’t be satisfied until we do.  

例如，超过一百万名亚马逊员工在我们的配送网络中工作。2018年，我们倡导15美元的最低工资（这比联邦最低工资高出一倍多），但这并没有止步于此。我们不断提高薪酬，目前我们的平均起薪小时工资已超过18美元。除了薪酬之外，我们还提供非常完善的福利，包括全面的健康保险、401K退休计划、最多20周的育儿假，以及为希望接受大学教育的员工（无论他们是否留在公司）提供全额学费支持。改善员工生活的工作远未结束。我们已经调研并列出了我们认为的100大员工体验痛点，并在系统性地解决这些问题。我们还热衷于进一步提升配送网络的安全性，重点减少拉伤、扭伤、跌倒以及重复性应力伤害。我们的伤害率有时被误解。我们的运营职位既符合“仓储”也符合“快递与配送”类别。根据最近的美国公开数据，我们的可记录事故率略高于仓储同行的平均水平（6.4对5.5），而略低于快递与配送同行的平均水平（7.6对9.1）。这使得我们的表现与同行大致持平，但我们不满足于平庸。我们力求做到行业最佳。当我刚上任时，我花了大量时间走访我们的配送中心和安全团队，希望能找到一种灵丹妙药迅速改变这些数字，但未能如愿。在我们的规模下（仅2021年我们就招聘了超过300,000人，其中许多人是首次从事此类工作，需要培训），要达到预期目标需要严格的分析、深思熟虑的问题解决能力以及不断创新的决心。我们一直在剖析每一个流程环节，寻找进一步改进的方法。我们正在实施多种项目（例如，轮岗计划帮助员工避免长时间重复同一动作、可穿戴设备在员工做出危险动作时发出提示、改进鞋款以提供更好的脚趾保护、关于身体力学、健康和安全实践的培训计划）。但我们仍有很长的路要走，我们将像对待其他客户体验那样对待这一问题——不断学习、创新和迭代，直到取得更具变革性的成果。只有做到这一点，我们才会感到满足。

  

Similarly, at our scale, we have a significant carbon footprint. It’s a big part of why we created The Climate Pledge a few years ago (a pledge to be net-zero carbon by 2040, ten years ahead of the Paris Agreement). We’re making significant progress on this effort (we’re committed to powering our operations with 100% renewable energy by 2025—five years ahead of our original target of 2030, we have ordered over 100,000 electric vans to deliver packages, and have over 300 companies who’ve joined us in The Climate Pledge). But, we have a different challenge than most companies given the diversity and intensity of our operations (including shipping billions of packages per year). We’re committed to the challenge, but it will take relentless invention.  

同样，凭借我们的规模，我们拥有相当大的碳足迹。这也是几年前我们发起“气候承诺”的重要原因之一（承诺到2040年实现净零碳排放，比《巴黎协定》提前十年）。在这项努力中我们取得了显著进展（我们承诺到2025年——比原定2030年提前五年——用100%可再生能源为我们的运营供能，我们已订购超过100,000辆电动货车用于包裹配送，并且已有超过300家公司加入了我们的气候承诺）。不过，鉴于我们业务的多样性和强度（包括每年配送数十亿个包裹），我们面临的挑战与大多数公司有所不同。我们对这一挑战充满信心，但这需要不断的创新才能实现。

  

We also are trying to increase the amount of affordable housing in the communities in which we have a large presence. Our more than $2 billion Housing Equity Fund that we started a year ago has already allocated $1.2 billion toward affordable housing initiatives in the areas around Washington state’s Puget Sound region, Arlington (Virginia), and Nashville (Tennessee).  

我们还在努力增加我们大规模存在社区中的经济适用房数量。我们一年前启动的超过20亿美元的住房权益基金已经在华盛顿州普吉特海湾地区、弗吉尼亚州阿灵顿和田纳西州纳什维尔等地区分配了12亿美元用于经济适用房项目。

  

A final quick example is Kuiper, our low Earth orbit satellite network that we’re spending over $10 billion to build in the next several years. Kuiper will serve customers with minimal to no fixed broadband connectivity, changing access to information and resources for many communities (analysts estimate approximately 300-400 million customers globally are in this category). We’re optimistic that there is a pretty good business model for us too, but we’ll see—and it’s a real game changer for underserved families and businesses that will unfold over many years as we keep evolving its capabilities.  

最后再举一个例子——Kuiper，即我们的低地轨道卫星网络，未来几年我们将在其建设上投入超过100亿美元。Kuiper将为那些固定宽带连接极少甚至没有的客户提供服务，改变许多社区获取信息和资源的方式（分析师估计全球大约有3亿至4亿客户属于这一类别）。我们乐观地认为这对我们来说也有一个相当不错的商业模式，但时间会证明一切——对于那些服务不足的家庭和企业来说，这将是一场真正的游戏规则改变者，随着其能力的不断提升，这一变革将在未来多年逐步展开.

This type of iterative innovation is pervasive across every team at Amazon. I could have given comparable examples in Advertising, Grocery, Gaming, Amazon Music, Amazon Care (our telemedicine offering), or Pharmacy, to name a few. All of these stories are still being written as we rapidly experiment, learn, and continue to try to make our customer experience better every day.

这种迭代式创新遍及亚马逊的每个团队。我本可以举出在广告、杂货、游戏、亚马逊音乐、亚马逊医疗（我们的远程医疗服务）或药房等领域的类似例子。这些故事仍在不断书写中，我们在迅速试验、学习，并不断努力改善客户体验。

If this approach sounds appealing, a natural question is what’s required to get good at it? It’s easier said than done, but here are some components that have helped us:

如果这种方法听起来有吸引力，一个自然的问题是：要做得好需要什么？说起来容易做起来难，但以下几个要素帮助了我们：

1/ Hire the Right Builders: We disproportionately index in hiring builders. We think of builders as people who like to invent, who look at customer experiences, dissect what doesn’t work well about them, and seek to reinvent them. We want people who keep asking why can’t it be done? We want people who like to experiment and tinker, and who realize launch is the starting line, not the finish line.

1/ 招聘合适的建设者：我们在招聘中格外重视那些“建设者”。我们认为建设者是喜欢发明的人，他们会审视客户体验，剖析其中的不完善之处，并努力加以改造。我们需要那些不断追问“为什么不能这样做？”的人，我们需要喜欢试验和改进的人，他们明白产品发布只是起点，而非终点。

2/ Organize Builders into Teams That Are as Separable and Autonomous as Possible: It’s hard for teams to be deep in what customers care about in multiple areas. It’s also hard to spend enough time on the new initiatives when there’s resource contention with the more mature businesses; the surer bets usually win out. Single-threaded teams will know their customers’ needs better, spend all their waking work hours inventing for them, and develop context and tempo to keep iterating quickly.

2/ 将建设者组织成尽可能独立自主的团队：团队很难同时深入多个客户关心的领域。当新项目与成熟业务争夺资源时，很难投入足够时间；通常最稳妥的方案会占上风。专注单一领域的团队能够更好地了解客户需求，全身心投入到为客户发明创新中，并形成持续快速迭代的背景和节奏。

3/ Give Teams the Right Tools and Permission to Move Fast: Speed is not pre-ordained. It’s a leadership choice. It has trade-offs, but you can’t wake up one day and start moving fast. It requires having the right tools to experiment and build fast (a major part of why we started AWS), allowing teams to make two-way door decisions themselves, and setting an expectation that speed matters. And, it does. Speed is disproportionally important to every business at every stage of its evolution. Those that move slower than their competitive peers fall away over time.

3/ 为团队提供合适的工具和快速行动的权限：速度不是命中注定的，而是一种领导决策。它有利弊，但你不能一觉醒来就突然快速运转。这需要拥有合适的工具来迅速试验和构建（这也是我们启动AWS的重要原因之一），让团队能够自主作出双向决策，并树立速度至关重要的预期。的确如此，速度对每个阶段的每个业务都极为重要，行动比竞争对手慢的企业最终会被淘汰。

4/ You Need Blind Faith, But No False Hope: This is a lyric from one of my favorite Foo Fighters songs (“Congregation”). When you invent, you come up with new ideas that people will reject because they haven’t been done before (that’s where the blind faith comes in), but it’s also important to step back and make sure you have a viable plan that’ll resonate with customers (avoid false hope). We’re lucky that we have builders who challenge each other, feedback loops that give us access to customer feedback, and a product development process of working backwards from the customer where having to write a Press Release (to flesh out the customer benefits) and a Frequently Asked Questions document (to detail how we’d build it) helps us have blind faith without false hope (at least usually).

4/ 你需要盲目的信念，但不能有虚假的希望：这句话摘自我最喜爱的Foo Fighters乐队的《Congregation》。当你发明时，会产生一些前所未有的新想法，这些想法可能会被人拒绝（这就是盲目信念的意义所在），但同样重要的是退一步，确保你有一个能引起客户共鸣的可行计划（避免虚假希望）。幸运的是，我们拥有能够相互挑战的建设者、获取客户反馈的反馈机制，以及以客户为逆向出发点的产品开发流程——我们需要撰写新闻稿（阐明客户收益）和常见问题文档（详细说明构建方式），这通常帮助我们拥有盲目的信念而不陷入虚假希望。

5/ Define a Minimum Loveable Product (MLP), and Be Willing to Iterate Fast: Figuring out where to draw the line for launch is one of the most difficult decisions teams must make. Often, teams wait too long, and insist on too many bells and whistles, before launching. And, they miss the first mover advantage or opportunity to build mindshare in fast-moving market segments before well-executing peers get too far ahead. The launch product must be good enough that you believe it’ll be loved from the get-go (why we call it a "Minimum Loveable Product" vs. a "Minimum Viable Product"), but in newer market segments, teams are often better off getting this MLP to customers and iterating quickly thereafter.

5/ 定义最小可爱产品（MLP），并愿意快速迭代：确定发布产品的界限是团队必须做出的最艰难决策之一。往往团队等待太久，坚持过多的附加功能，才发布产品，从而错失了先发优势或在快速变化的市场中建立品牌认知的机会，导致表现优异的竞争对手抢占先机。发布的产品必须足够好，让你相信它一开始就会受到喜爱（这就是我们称之为“最小可爱产品”而非“最小可行产品”的原因），但在新兴市场领域，团队通常最好尽早将这种MLP交付给客户，并迅速进行迭代。

6/ Adopt a Long-term Orientation: We’re sometimes criticized at Amazon for not shutting much down. It’s true that we have a longer tolerance for our investments than most companies. But, we know that transformational invention takes multiple years, and if you’re making big bets that you believe could substantially change customer experience (and your company), you have to be in it for the long-haul or you’ll give up too quickly.

6/ 采取长期导向：亚马逊有时会因不轻易关闭项目而受到批评。的确，我们对投资的容忍度比大多数公司要长。但我们知道，变革性发明需要数年的时间，如果你下大赌注，认为这些赌注能够显著改变客户体验（乃至整个公司），你必须坚持长远，否则就会过早放弃。

7/ Brace Yourself for Failure: If you invent a lot, you will fail more often than you wish. Nobody likes this part, but it comes with the territory. When it’s clear that we’ve launched something that won’t work, we make sure we’ve learned from what didn’t go well, and secure great landing places for team members who delivered well—or your best people will hesitate to work on new initiatives.

7/ 准备好面对失败：如果你不断发明，你会比预期失败得更多。虽然没人喜欢这一部分，但这是必然的。当显然推出的某个项目行不通时，我们会确保从失败中吸取教训，并为表现出色的团队成员找到良好的归宿——否则，你最优秀的人才将会对参与新项目犹豫不决。

Albert Einstein is sometimes credited with describing compound interest as the eighth wonder of the world ("He who understands it, earns it. He who doesn’t, pays it"). We think of iterative innovation in much the same way. Iterative innovation creates magic for customers. Constantly inventing and improving products for customers has a compounding effect on the customer experience, and in turn on a business’s prospects.  

有时人们认为阿尔伯特·爱因斯坦曾把复利形容为世界的第八大奇迹（“懂得复利者获利，不懂者付出”）。我们对迭代式创新的看法也是如此。迭代式创新为客户创造了魔力，不断为客户发明和改进产品对客户体验产生复利效应，进而影响企业的前景.

Time is your friend when you are compounding gains. Amazon is a big company with some large businesses, but it’s still early days for us. We will continue to be insurgent—inventing in businesses that we’re in, in new businesses that we’ve yet to launch, and in new ideas that we haven’t even imagined yet. It remains Day 1.  

当你积累收益时，时间就是你的朋友。亚马逊是一家拥有庞大业务的大公司，但对我们来说，这仍然是起步阶段。我们将继续保持颠覆性——在现有业务中不断创新，在尚未推出的新业务中进行创新，以及在我们甚至未曾想象的新理念中进行创新。今天依然是第一天.

Sincerely,  

此致敬礼,

Andy Jassy  

安迪·贾西

President and Chief Executive Officer  

总裁兼首席执行官

Amazon.com, Inc.  

亚马逊公司

P.S. As we have always done, our original 1997 Shareholder Letter follows. What’s written there is as true today as it was in 1997.  

附注：正如我们一直以来所做的，以下是我们1997年的原始股东信。其内容今天依然与1997年一样真实.