Amazon is closing on Walmart as the biggest employer of labour: Amazon reported 1.125 million employees at the end of Q3 2020. Walmart employs 1.5 million people in the US but 2.2 million globally. Looking at the chart, you see about 430,300 employees in 10 months, or +50% from a year ago. Yes, those asset-lite messages on ecommerce operations have fallen apart: I have long maintained that there is nothing digitally leverageable on ecommerce when you look at the marginal cost trajectory. Ecommerce operators exhibit the typical average fixed cost shape as they gain scale.
Amazon could even overcome Walmart in that huge record: the world’s largest employer of labour as it ramps up employee headcounts over the next two years. Largely, as Amazon builds up its logistics, we are learning quickly that ecommerce can indeed power a new labour force. This could be a good outcome as many had postulated that the rise of ecommerce could bring doom in the labour force.
Yes, the question is this: how far will Jeff Bezos, the boss of Amazon, get in his mission of absolute domination of retail America? Amazon is worth $1.59 trillion while “smaller” Walmart commands $433 billion. Yes, Amazon can buy Walmart and still have a change of $1 trillion+. That is all textbook analysis to help us see what is at stake here.
A nation rises when pioneering entrepreneurs emerge. America has many in abundance, luckily for it. Look at the curve, it is all the way to a great parabolic one: those are jobs and opportunities.
Tekedia Mini-MBA edition 16 (Feb 10 – May 3, 2025) opens registrations; register today for early bird discounts.
Tekedia AI in Business Masterclass opens registrations here.
Join Tekedia Capital Syndicate and invest in Africa’s finest startups here.
Nigeria: blessed will be when your pioneering entrepreneurs are unleashed, untethered by the bounds of state capitals and Aso Rock, to rise to the mountaintop. Amen to that, somebody!
---
Register for Tekedia Mini-MBA (Feb 10 - May 3, 2025), and join Prof Ndubuisi Ekekwe and our global faculty; click here.
It’s great that the employees headcount is also increasing, so that those who believe the chasm that technology will create fewer jobs would have a rethink. We are not likely to have less people working, only the nature of jobs will change.
As for Nigeria, our economic fundamentals remain supremely weak, so we have a situation where banks are more profitable than productive sectors; it’s one anomaly we must fix, if the economy must roar. Which other sector can boast of five companies declaring profits of over N50 billion here per annum? It is not that the volume of financial transactions or services is really high, but our compromised system made it possible for this sort of lopsided outcomes.
Have just five top performers in each sector of the economy, and the bleeding naira and ballooning unemployment will cease. There’s too much attention in political offices because nothing much is happening elsewhere, if the economy becomes robust and productive, not many people will remember the name their vice president, let alone senators and other talking heads we have all over the place.
As long as the worst of us remain our polebearers, the march to economic greatness will remain desolate and uninspiring.