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A comment on Sales Are Colossal, Shares Are Soaring. All Amazon Is Missing Is a Profit. Parent comment

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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