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Fair, I'm overstating it. They basically kept wall street happy with their profit in AWS, while having comparatively little realized profit in retail, allowing
by lostcolony 5y ago
Fair, I'm overstating it. They basically kept wall street happy with their profit in AWS, while having comparatively little realized profit in retail, allowing them to keep margins in retail extremely thin. I'm explicitly thinking of 2010-2015ish, when I recall seeing news articles about it, but I'm way too lazy to go find them. Either way, I completely agree that they're now in such a dominant position they don't have to have predatory pricing to still capture a huge part of the market.
- lotsofpulp 5y agoRetail margins are already extremely thin at ~2%. However, the public markets allowed AMZN to maintain at 0% or even slightly negative because the market (correctly) believed the group of people at Amazon were doing something innovative. The market could have chosen Walmart, or Target or Home Depot too, but they did not (correctly) because the chances of the people working at those companies coming out with something like AWS is insufficient. Amazon is a poor company to use as an example for one that dumps their product at below cost in hopes of gaining market share.