Re:Sears has another chance to avoid closing down
by roenxi on Tuesday January 08, 2019 @04:24PM
(#18859848)
But as a counterpoint, why would anyone build this business? Compare Amazon's profits [0] to Walmart's [1]. Assuming I've got the right chart, and recalling that the profits are coming from AWS (ie, unrelated to the catalog business), is it obvious that a sane management team would want to replicate Amazon?
We're talking two decade of basically no profits. Risk free rate of profit (ie, bonds) was something like 5% for a lot of that period, although there is obviously a lot more to consider. This is longer than long term from an investment standpoint - compare it to jobs who took Apple from "return the money to shareholders" to "most profitable company in the world" in a bit more than a decade.
We're talking two decade of basically no profits. Risk free rate of profit (ie, bonds) was something like 5% for a lot of that period, although there is obviously a lot more to consider. This is longer than long term from an investment standpoint - compare it to jobs who took Apple from "return the money to shareholders" to "most profitable company in the world" in a bit more than a decade.
[0] https://ycharts.com/companies/AMZN/profit_margin [1] https://ycharts.com/companies/WMT/profit_margin