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Warren Buffet’s annual letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders has been required reading for investors for decades. Now Jeff Bezos’s annual letter — the latest was released April 11 — is gaining the same kind of currency. Wall Street analysts (and CNBC’s Jim Cramer) view it as an invaluable window into the strategic focus of Amazon.com — the world’s largest online marketplace and cloud computing company. To understand where Bezos is taking his famously secretive business, which has disrupted industry after industry, many analysts say there’s no better indicator than his letter.

So, we decided to analyze Amazon’s shareholder letters to better understand Bezos’ perspective and the drivers for Amazon’s growth. We started with all of Amazon’s shareholder letters from the years 1997-2017 and used two tools, NVivo 12 Pro and Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC), to analyze the text. The output from these analyses tells us much about the CEO’s priorities for his company:

1. Amazon is as customer-centric as people say, but that’s not its only concern.

Analysts frequently describe Amazon as one of the most customer-centric companies they have encountered. One described it as “an innovative company that starts with thinking about what can make the customers’ lives more convenient.” So, we decided to test the letters to see just how customer-centric Amazon has been over the years by counting the number of times that the word “customer” was used in each shareholder letter. We found that the word “customer” was, in fact, the most commonly used word across all the letters, followed by “Amazon,” “new,” and “business.”

But when we analyze the letters on a year-by-year basis, we see a less consistent picture (refer to the chart above). In 13 out of the 21 letters we analyzed, “customer” remained the most commonly used word, but customers were eclipsed by other concerns in the years 2004-2007, 2010, 2011, 2013, and 2017.

For example, the analysis of the 2004 shareholder letter reveals a focus on organizational health. That year, the five most commonly used words were “cash,” “flows,” “earnings,” “capital,” and “free,” signaling a concern with finances. The first sentence of Bezos’ lays it all out: “Our ultimate financial measure, and the one we most want to drive over the long-term, is free cash flow per share.”

In 2006, the five most commonly used words were “businesses,” “new,” “Amazon,” “grow,” and “culture”— signaling a focus on expansion and growth. In that letter, Bezos writes, “At Amazon’s current scale, planting seeds that will grow into meaningful new businesses takes some discipline, a bit of patience, and a nurturing culture. Our established businesses are well-rooted young trees. They are growing, enjoy high returns on capital, and operate in very large market segments. These characteristics set a high bar for any new business we would start. Before we invest our shareholders’ money in a new business, we must convince ourselves that the new opportunity can generate the returns on capital our investors expected when they invested in Amazon. And we must convince ourselves that the new business can grow to a scale where it can be significant in the context of our overall company.”

The word frequencies for the 2007, 2010, 2011 shareholder letters suggest a focus on the development business segments, namely its Kindle e-reader devices and Amazon Web Services (AWS), and a shift towards creating a two-sided platform for services, goods, and content. The five most commonly used words in 2007 are “book,” “Kindle,” “reading,” “change,” and “tools.” The five most commonly used words in 2011 were “Amazon,” “authors,” “get,” “KDP” (Kindle Direct Publishing), and “publishing” — suggesting that Amazon was focused on developing its e-book ecosystem. In particular, almost half of Bezos’ 2011 shareholder letter is comprised of testimonials from authors, third-party sellers, and other members of Amazon’s network. Bezos commented: “The most radical and transformative of inventions are often those that empower others to unleash their creativity – to pursue their dreams. That’s a big part of what’s going on with Amazon Web Services, Fulfillment by Amazon, and Kindle Direct Publishing. With AWS, FBA, and KDP, we are creating powerful self-service platforms that allow thousands of people to boldly experiment and accomplish things that would otherwise be impossible or impractical. These innovative, large-scale platforms are not zero-sum — they create win-win situations and create significant value for developers, entrepreneurs, customers, authors, and readers.”

In 2010, the shareholder letters emphasized “data,” “Amazon,” “services,” “systems,” and “technology” — possibly suggesting a focus on Amazon’s technology offerings and the underlying systems that run Amazon’s platforms. In that letter, Bezos praises Amazon’s ability to translate cutting-edge science into marketable innovation. He writes: “All the effort we put into technology might not matter that much if we kept technology off to the side in some sort of R&D department, but we don’t take that approach. Technology infuses all of our teams, all of our processes, our decision-making, and our approach to innovation in each of our businesses. It is deeply integrated into everything we do.”

While our analysis largely substantiates the popular view that Bezos prioritizes customer-centricity, it suggests that there is more nuance to his decision-making. Through the years he has equally considered — in varying degrees —multiple internal and external factors such as competencies, competition, suppliers, and investors.

2. There may be an optimal level of customer-centricity.

We noted that the number of references to customers was inconsistent throughout the years and has only recently stabilized (see Figure 2 below). At its peak, Bezos spent almost 40% of his letter discussing customers, while in other years, he spent less 5% of the total text on them. Starting in 2013, Bezos has consistently devoted less than 15% of his letters to discussing customers.

Our findings suggest that Bezos may have found an optimal level of customer-centricity as Amazon has matured. Compared to earlier years, in which his customer focus has fluctuated wildly from year-to-year, Bezos’ letters have stabilized to devote approximately 12% to customers. We believe that this level of content potentially allows Bezos to maintain his customer focused lens while exploring other subjects in depth.

3. Bezos is worried about blue-collar workers.

Another key topic in Amazon’s shareholder letters was employees. We coded 48 separate references to “employees” altogether, the third highest number of references after customers and retail. On average, Bezos devoted approximately 4.2% of each letter to discussing employees with a median of 2.4% and a peak of 16% in his 2013 letter (see the chart below). Most references Bezos made about employees overall praised Amazon’s engineering team. This finding aligns with author Brad Stone’s reporting in The Everything Store, in which he documented how fiercely Amazon was competing with companies like Google for engineering and management talent in its early years.

Engineers were not Bezos’s only employee concern, however. Starting in 2013, his focus started to shift towards Amazon’s blue-collar workers. In that year’s shareholder letter, when the number of references to “employees” peaked, Bezos introduced two new programs for fulfillment center workers, Career Choice and Pay to Quit. The Career Choice program pre-pays 95% of tuition for a limited range of in-demand career fields. In Pay to Quit, employees are offered between $2,000 and $5,000 to quit after their initial training period, ensuring that only new hires who had committed to its core values remained.

Since introducing those programs, Bezos has written about them in every subsequent shareholder letter except for 2016 and has spent 2%-4% of each letter discussing fulfillment center employees. In his 2015 shareholder letter, Bezos shared that Amazon was introducing additional programs to engage workers with families — among them Leave Share, which allows spouses to pool their vacation days, and Ramp Back, which allows new mothers to pace their return to work. In the same letter, Bezos also noted that fulfillment center employees received the same healthcare benefits that Amazon’s senior executives did.

Our analysis highlights Amazon’s focus on customers, but it may be just as important to consider what’s not in the letters. For example, in his 2013 shareholder letter, Bezos wrote: “Failure comes part and parcel with invention. It’s not optional. We understand that and believe in failing early and iterating until we get it right.” Yet, none of Bezos’ letters directly addresses any of Amazon’s failures, including the well-publicized Fire phone, nor the process of iteration and learning that Bezos alludes to. The lack of details on these core subjects may itself suggest that they are important concerns.