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Re:Fixing the ‘Brain Damage’ Caused by the I.P.O. Process by sulam on Wednesday September 20, 2017 @01:54PM (#15296490)
Amazon is exceptional. Emulating Amazon will get most companies delisted.
Re:Fixing the ‘Brain Damage’ Caused by the I.P.O. Process by opportune on Wednesday September 20, 2017 @07:05PM (#15299147)
They're not "exceptional" they've just managed to find productive ways to reinvest their profits.

The reason their stock is valued so much is partly because if he wanted/needed to, Bezos could wake up one day and cut all programs focused on expansion and return the saved costs / new profits as dividends. The reason this doesn't happen is that the money is (thought to be) better spent on increasing the size of the business. There's no reason other companies couldn't do this, although I expect the main limit to this strategy is the extent to which you can productively reinvest capital. This is a function of foresight/luck (e.g. branching into AWS) but also of the market you're in: to what extent do you begin to experience diminishing returns as you spend more money on improving your product? I think that with logistics, as with Amazon and e.g. Walmart, the returns diminish very slowly, or even increase with money spent (economies of scale).

Re:Fixing the ‘Brain Damage’ Caused by the I.P.O. Process by hellbanner on Wednesday September 20, 2017 @02:15PM (#15296680)
Can you describe more about what practices would cause delisting?
Re:Fixing the ‘Brain Damage’ Caused by the I.P.O. Process by piker on Wednesday September 20, 2017 @02:21PM (#15296743)
Running out of money by only spending on R&D and having your share price drop below listing thresholds, I think, is the implication.
Re:Fixing the ‘Brain Damage’ Caused by the I.P.O. Process by sulam on Wednesday September 20, 2017 @02:32PM (#15296854)
Yeah, I don't think you'd even have to run out of money. There are plenty of companies generating a fair amount of cash flow that hover in the dangerous territory of < $3 a share. It only takes one bad quarter.

Here's an example of a company that generates cash but only recently is in the safe-ish territory:

https://finance.google.com/finance?q=LLNW

(Not that I think they are emulating Amazon, mind you, just making the point that you can have a going concern, and still get delisted.)

More broadly, unless you have an amazing business, you probably shouldn't emulate Amazon (or Google, or FB, or any other business that is depending on free cash flow to fund R&D as opposed to generating profits).

Re:Fixing the ‘Brain Damage’ Caused by the I.P.O. Process by goialoq on Wednesday September 20, 2017 @02:45PM (#15296968)
> the dangerous territory of < $3 a share.

that's only dangerous until the stock does a reverse split.

Re:Fixing the ‘Brain Damage’ Caused by the I.P.O. Process by s73ver_ on Wednesday September 20, 2017 @06:08PM (#15298771)
Share price doesn't dictate how much money they have. Amazon makes buttloads of money; they just choose to use it rather than give it back as dividends.
Re:Fixing the ‘Brain Damage’ Caused by the I.P.O. Process by piker on Thursday September 21, 2017 @06:32AM (#15302054)
No. That wasn't implied either. Conversely, net profits do tend to be a positive indicator of share price.

It's also incorrect to say that AMZN "makes buttloads of money", with sub-1 EPS[1] at a nearly $1,000 share price.

[1] https://finance.google.co.uk/finance?q=NASDAQ%3AAMZN&fstype=...

Re:Fixing the ‘Brain Damage’ Caused by the I.P.O. Process by s73ver_ on Thursday September 21, 2017 @12:28PM (#15305070)
Just shy of $38 billion in one quarter revenue is "Buttloads of money". I wasn't necessarily relating it to the share price.