>Your places smell funny.
Billy, no one can ever accuse you of not having one hell of a nose!
Does that cause you problems when you're doing push ups?
>Last year Time was kind to Jeff Bezos but since then time has been less so. Time magazine's 1999 "Man of the Year" lost 80 per cent of his net worth - roughly $10bn - in 2000 and found himself for the first time the subject of a far more critical kind of attention. Of course, the chairman and founder of Amazon.com would be the last to see it so gloomily.
The irrepressible Bezos, whose barking guffaw has become a personal trademark, maintains: "It has been a great business year." In just 12 months, the company's customer base has grown from 13m to 25m people, he enthuses. His domain stretches across the US, the UK, Germany, France and Japan - which account for 90 per cent of today's internet users.
Personally, he adds, 2000 has been a landmark year. The former hedge fund manager is one of the few executives who admits to requiring eight hours' sleep - but nine months ago he became a father.
When it comes to parental gushing, Bezos outdoes his peers. Talking about his son, Preston, he says: "My wife and I were ill-prepared mentally for how deeply we'd fall in love with this guy."
He is just as effusive about his corporate offspring. Interbrand, the marketing group, named the online retailer the 48th most valuable brand in the world, no mean feat for a company only five years older than Preston. "Even in Sweden, where we have no operations, we have been named the 36th most trusted brand - ahead of Volvo."
Unfortunately, investors have become far less trusting. Since last December, as enthusiasm for all things online has ebbed, Amazon's share price has been swept from above $100 to below $20 this month. Bezos is not one to admit to having low points but he concedes that the moment in March when the Nasdaq began to tumble was a turning point: "You could see something qualitative had changed in the stock market."
While Bezos dismisses this year's extraordinary volatility as "like the weather - something you can do nothing about in the short term", he claims disarmingly to know a lot less about investor sentiment than about e-commerce.
Speaking like a true veteran, the 36-year-old is disparaging about the e-tailing upstarts who "raised $60m with a single phone call" just before the funding party ended. After all, it took him four months to raise his first million: "My first $300,000 came from my parents and for the next $1m I had to talk to 60 people, 20 of whom invested $50,000 each." That, he says, is a normal capital market.
Several of Amazon's peers have suffered far worse fates than a falling stock price. But site closures have even taken a toll on the industry leader, which went on a stock shopping spree while the market was still strong. When Pets.com and Living.com, two of the commercial partners from which it was expecting hefty fees and handsome equity profits, closed down this year, Amazon's reputation for stock picking suffered.
Meanwhile on Wall Street, applause for Amazon's rapidly growing revenues has turned to mutterings about its lack of profits. Bears argue that this Christmas was Amazon's last chance to prove that its business model stacks up as impressively as its losses have to date.
Looking back on the year, Bezos is unlikely to forget the day in June when Ravi Suria, a Lehman Brothers bond analyst, knocked a fifth off the stock by questioning Amazon's ability to survive. For once, the Snoopy-faced Bezos displays the faintest irritation: "There are always many, many myths about highly visible companies. Usually they're not worth stamping out but this one was."
Amazon, he maintains, will end 2000 with about $1bn of cash, dip no lower than $700m in the first quarter of 2001 and begin churning out cash from then on.
The challenges of 2000 have not all come from the market. Midway through the year, Joe Galli quit after just 13 months as Amazon's chief operating officer, having decided that running his own show on the east coast would be preferable to the Seattle drizzle. Staff further down the ranks of "Team Amazon", meanwhile, faced the fact that the value of their stock options could go down as well as up. Amazon has issued new options at a lower price but this has not averted an attempt to unionise the pickers, packers and reformed hackers.
After all this, many CEOs would have been looking forward to kicking back for a welcome holiday break. For Bezos, however, this season could make or break his year. Not only is this the busiest time of year for any retailer, old economy or new, but Bezos has the added pressure of having to prove the doubters wrong. Already, a warning from rival eToys has knocked any holiday optimism out of Amazon's stock. A few high-profile tales of missing presents would make things much worse.
Having spent previous Christmases wrapping boxes to help with the holiday rush, Bezos has at least learnt to get his gift shopping out of the way early. Before Christmas, he confided that his gift for Preston was a Fisher Price Intelli-Table (described by Amazon as "a sturdy little dynamo of function and versatility"). Fittingly, given Bezos's year, even this task was not plain sailing. When he first went online to buy the $69.99 toy, he found Amazon had none in stock. |
