o, Jeff Bezos announced his
intention to launch Amazon Japan in the near future. He
insisted on the high potential of the Japanese market, with
expensive real estate affecting the prices of goods and
services and, as a result, online shopping being more
convenient than traditional shopping. High population density
would mean easy and cheap home deliveries.

A Japanese call center opened in August 2000 in Sapporo, a city
on the Hokkaido island. Amazon Japan opened three months
later, in November 2000, as the fourth subsidiary of Amazon and
first non-European subsidiary, with a catalog of 1.1 million
titles in Japanese and 600,000 titles in English. To reduce
delivery times to 24 to 48 hours instead of six weeks for books
published in the U.S., a large distribution center (15,800 m2)
was created in Ichikawa, a town in the east of Tokyo.

In November 2000, Amazon had 7,500 employees, a catalog of 28
million items, and 23 million clients worldwide. It opened its
digital library with 1,000 ebooks, and the promise of many more
titles for soon.

Amazon also began focusing on the French-language market in
Canada. It hired staff knowing the language and the market, to
be able to offer French-language books, music and films (VHS
and DVD) in a Canadian subsidiary. Amazon Canada, the fifth
subsidiary of the company, was finally launched in June 2002
with a bilingual (English, French) website.

Surprisingly, even for the marketing of a main online
bookstore, paper was not dead. For two consecutive years, in
1999 and 2000, Amazon sent a print catalog to its customers (10
million in 2000) before the holiday season.

2001 marked a turning point for the company, with the need to
address the internet bubble affecting the "new" economy and so
many companies. Following a deficit for the fourth quarter
2000, Amazon reduced its workforce by 15% in January 2001.
1,300 employees lost their jobs in the U.S. 270 employees lost
their jobs in Europe. Jeff Bezos decided to diversify the
products sold online, and to sell not only books, videos, CDs
and software, but also health care products, toys, electronics,
kitchen utensils, and garden tools. In November 2001, cultural
products - books, CDs and videos - represented only 58% of
sales, the total of which were US $4 billion, with 29 million
customers.

The company was beneficiary for the first time in the third
quarter 2003.

In October 2003, Amazon launched a full text search (Search