What Are Amazon’s Biggest Acquisitions?

Ecommerce giant, Amazon, began as a small online book reseller in 1994 and has grown into one of the largest corporations in the world. The company has made some interesting acquisitions over the years, with their biggest ones catapulting them into brand new industries. We came across Visual Capitalist’s galactic-inspired chart, Amazon’s Most Notable Acquisitions To Date, which illustrates Amazon’s expanding galaxy with a timeline of their most notable acquisitions using data collected from Crunchbase.

Click below to zoom

The company’s first acquisition of IMDb in 1998 was valued at $55 million, and the price tags have only grown since then. Their most recent acquisition, and one of their biggest to date, of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) for $8.45 billion dollars was announced in May 2021 and signals that Amazon plans to expand its entertainment sector in a major way. According to Visual Capitalist, this acquisition of MGM will add more than twenty thousand pieces of film and TV shows to Amazon’s robust library of streaming content. If this massive eight billion-dollar price tag wasn’t their biggest acquisition, then what was? That would be when they acquired grocery-giant Whole Foods Market in 2017 for a whopping $13.7 billion. To date, Amazon has made 4 massive acquisitions that are valued at more than a billion dollars. Aside from Whole Foods Market and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Amazon’s billion-dollar acquisitions include Zoox in June 2020 and Zappos in 2009 for $1.2 billion each. These 21 acquisitions aren’t Amazon’s only ones though, they have acquired or invested in far more – at least 128 companies. Which industry do you think Amazon will set its sights on next?