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They'll grow for a while yet but I don't see how they'll keep doing that, moreover, I don't see how they'll ever get to the margins they need. Cloud services a
by alexasmyths 9y ago
They'll grow for a while yet but I don't see how they'll keep doing that, moreover, I don't see how they'll ever get to the margins they need.
Cloud services are also a competitive business and margins I think will erode eventually.
- adventured 9y agoWalmart is at $425-$450 billion in traditional retail sales ($485b total), it very clearly can be done. Ecommerce will double over the next ten years in the US. Out of the trillion dollars in that ecommerce expansion, Amazon will very likely get at least a quarter of it. If you slow Amazon's growth down to something like 9%-12% avg per year over the next 10 years - which is very reasonable based on where they're at now - they're over half a trillion in sales at the end of that. On a modest decline from the present rate of growth, they'll hit $300+ billion in sales in just three years. AWS should easily be at a $9b operating income annualized run-rate, at that point. The common proclaim for years now, has been that there would be no margins in cloud services. AWS has always proven that wrong, all the way back. There's no reason to believe after 11 years, the margins are suddenly going to disappear. If the fierce AWS / Azure / GC competition the last five years didn't squeeze those margins out yet, then what would? It's more likely that the AWS margins will hold as they add more specialized services that are difficult for basic / smaller competitors to replicate (unlike eg standard compute or database services).