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This is a myopic view. Amazon's physical retail has been amazingly profitable for a long time. And when you go into the oldest categories of physical retail (bo
by WoahNoun 5y ago
This is a myopic view. Amazon's physical retail has been amazingly profitable for a long time. And when you go into the oldest categories of physical retail (books, electronics, baby, fashion, etc), they were each massively unprofitable for a time until they became massively profitable.
https://hurricanecapital.wordpress.com/2015/11/30/business-insider-amazon-ceo-jeff-bezos-interview-part-i/ https://hurricanecapital.wordpress.com/2015/11/30/business-i...
>HB: So, let’s just establish this once and for all. Can Amazon make money?
>JB: Well, yes, and in fact we have in the past. And you have to understand, there are many ways of thinking about this, but the reality is that Amazon is a collection of several businesses and initiatives. And we have some very significant, very profitable, more established businesses that are free cash-flow generating. Very significantly. And fortunately, the way I think about it, we have lots of opportunities to invest in this new initiatives, and we take advantage of those opportunities. So, it’s kind of like we built this lemonade stand, you know, twenty years ago. The lemonade stand has become very profitable over time. But we also decided to use our skills and the assets that we’ve acquired over time to open up a hamburger stand, and a hot dog stand, and so on and so on. So we’re investing in new initiatives.
>JB: Look, you know. Warren Buffett has this great quote, he says: “You can hold a rock concert, and that’s okay. And you can hold a ballet, and that’s okay. Just don’t hold a rock concert and advertise it as ballet.” Investors come in all shapes and sizes. They have different investment horizons, different approaches, different beliefs about what the right kind of portfolio looks like. And, so it’s not when you know people use Wall Street as a shorthand. But there isn’t one type of investor, they come in different shapes and sizes. You have to be super clear about what kind of company you’re trying to build, what your approach is. We laid that out in our 1997 annual shareholder letter. We said we were going to take big bets. We said they were gonna fail. We said some of them hopefully were gonna work. We said we were gonna to invest for the long term, that we were gonna to take advantage of market opportunities as they arose. And there’s a certain kind of investor who is aligned with that approach. And so again, you could hold the ballet or the rock concert, and both can work. Just be clear about which one you are, and then people can self select.
- danielmarkbruce 5y agoThis story of "profitable lines" has hung around forever. Every retail business has profitable lines and loss leaders. Many non retail business have them too. The problem with this line of reasoning is it assumes you can cut off the loss leaders and just run the profitable lines. Generally speaking, you can't. The customers come to Amazon because everything is there. The second they think everything isn't there, they come less frequently, and those "amazingly profitable" categories become not so amazing or profitable. Rotisserie chicken is a loss leader for many supermarkets, and the supermarket makes a lot of money on those snacks near the register. They can't decide to be in the snacks only business tomorrow. Neither can Amazon. The story about the ambition and the growth and all that is nice - that story is true for Facebook, Google, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft and so on. They all got profitable within a decade and continued with high growth, high profitability operations.
- WoahNoun 5y agoThis isn't an accurate view of Amazon's current position in physical ecommerce. They always planned for each unprofitable line to become profitable as it matured. Amazon's doesn't have many loss leaders in physical ecommerce any more. They used them to build those businesses 10-15 years ago, but they don't need them anymore. The only loss leaders as a category they maintain are digital. And even that is pretty limited to Amazon Video/Studios at this point.
- danielmarkbruce 5y agoIt's a false division - physical v digital. Prime customers get free delivery (physical) + video. AWS is a genuinely different business, the rest of it is all bundled together. So, they have digital loss leaders. And they may not have many physical loss leaders, but the ongoing argument that they have all these lines which are profitable just doesn't mean anything when customers don't want an online shop for X specific thing. They want an "everything store".
- WoahNoun 5y agoPrime video only exists because of the incremental prime sign-ups, prime renewals, and prime spending money on physical retail. It's all they care about.