Sales Are Colossal, Shares Are Soaring. All Amazon Is Missing Is a Profit

Re:Sales Are Colossal, Shares Are Soaring. All Amazon Is Mis... by hemancuso on Tuesday October 22, 2013 @09:02AM (#6591527)

The real story is that Amazon is investing every dollar that could be realized as profit back into the company. Completely amazing given the scale. Imagine instead of sitting on a gargantuan pile of cash Apple could figure out how to efficiently invest $150B back into the company [and not through a buyback]. You can argue Amazon doesn't NEED to aggressively expand its warehousing infrastructure if the goal was to turn profit. It doesn't NEED to build AWS or the multitude of other smaller business lines, but it does.

A dream for many entrepreneurs is to start a fairly conservative line of business that buys freedom and a stable stream of revenue [consulting, online bookstore] and use the profits to fund a swing-for-the-fences idea. It's absolutely amazing that Amazon keeps that model going decades later.

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Re:Sales Are Colossal, Shares Are Soaring. All Amazon Is Mis... by Rimpinths on Tuesday October 22, 2013 @10:47AM (#6592217)

There was an interesting article on Seeking Alpha a few months ago comparing Wal-Mart with Amazon at the same stage of growth (i.e. comparable level of overall revenue and revenue growth). He compared Wal-Mart in 1990-92 and Amazon in 2010-12:

http://seekingalpha.com/article/1547622-is-amazon-com-the-ne...

He noted that Wal-Mart had about the same levels of CapEx spending (~4%), yet it was also highly profitable by that point. Amazon isn't spending any more on CapEx than Wal-Mart was at the same stage of growth.

So Amazon isn't on some unique path in the business world by choosing to divert its profits to CapEx spending. Its level of CapEx spending is comparable to Wal-Mart at the same stage of growth. It simply has such low margins that it has no profits leftover after its CapEx spending.

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Re:Sales Are Colossal, Shares Are Soaring. All Amazon Is Mis... by tixocloud on Tuesday October 22, 2013 @09:32AM (#6591703)

Apple does not see opportunity at the moment which is why it's holding the huge amount of cash. And I do recall Steve Jobs giving advice about really focusing on the few things that the company does that makes it so great which would help explain it's huge cash reserves. The company is not trying to enter many different markets all at once.

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Re:Sales Are Colossal, Shares Are Soaring. All Amazon Is Mis... by nl on Tuesday October 22, 2013 @10:21AM (#6592064)

Apple does not see opportunity at the moment which is why it's holding the huge amount of cash.

Exactly - that's the OP's point.

Amazon has the vision to invest its cash in building entire new lines of business, whereas Apple can't see any opportunities.

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Re:Sales Are Colossal, Shares Are Soaring. All Amazon Is Mis... by tixocloud on Tuesday October 22, 2013 @12:14PM (#6592892)

But it's not Apple's game to play in the things that Amazon plays. Amazon has their own strategy and Apple has their own strategy. Building entire new lines of business is risky and Apple probably does not think that the risk is worth the reward at the end. There's also the question of whether Apple can do as well as Amazon at what it does.

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Re:Sales Are Colossal, Shares Are Soaring. All Amazon Is Mis... by hershel on Tuesday October 22, 2013 @12:39PM (#6593075)

It's partly because is amazon is high margin business, so it view almost everything as an opportunity to raise revenue and 9maybe margins) , but apple is a high margin company, and those opportunists are harder to find.

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Re:Sales Are Colossal, Shares Are Soaring. All Amazon Is Mis... by scarmig on Tuesday October 22, 2013 @10:31AM (#6592136)

That's just the thing: even if a company like Apple might be inclined to ignore short-sighted shareholders, nearly always they don't have the institutional capacity to find good uses for cash. Look at companies like Google and Yahoo: they throw excess cash around like crazy, rolling the dice to hit something great. (Even Google's solid, cool projects like the driverless car are highly speculative.)

Everything Amazon does, by contrast, is very clearly focused on one clear goal: becoming the retailer of record. It is able, either by institutional constitution or the nature of its market, to make investments in itself that will clearly add to its bottom line, either one or five or ten years from now.

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Re:Sales Are Colossal, Shares Are Soaring. All Amazon Is Mis... by tixocloud on Tuesday October 22, 2013 @12:24PM (#6592969)

Opportunities are in abundance but opportunities for Google, Amazon and Yahoo may not be the same opportunities for Apple. Sure, it might frustrate shareholders as it is their money. But when you pay for Apple stock, you pay for Apple's strategy and Apple's strategy right now hasn't been to invest their excess cash. In which case, I personally think that they should return some of it to shareholders, which they are to some degree.

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