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Comment by xyzzy123 | Hacker News Reader

Conveniently ignoring 34% revenue growth per year for the last 5 years: http://ycharts.com/companies/AMZN/revenue_growth

Perhaps Amazon's investors recognise that there is still a lot of room for growth in online commerce...

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He's not ignoring the growth. He's dismissing it because growth by itself is meaningless. Profit is what's relevant, and unless you can improve your earnings, you're not functioning efficiently from a capitalistic viewpoint. As he discusses, Amazon shareholders are expecting that at some point, Amazon will be able to somehow ratchet up their profit margins, and the subsequent earnings boost will provide value to their shareholders. If that never happens, AMZN is a bubble just like tulips.

I see your point.

Perhaps what's reassuring to investors is that Amazon don't have to change their business model to become profitable. They just need to pull the pricing lever a bit harder.

That is a fundamental change in their business model. Retail businesses have two fundamental elements; price and service. Amazon's Prime membership is part of their extraordinary service, as is their return policy (in general), and the convenience of ordering online.

If Amazon elevates prices a significant amount (what investors seem to be expecting), then they cut out one of their fundamentals.

Now there's a lot to be said that investors aren't looking that far ahead. My personal belief is that most investors these days are looking for stocks and bonds based on the greater fool theory, as opposed to investing with the expectation of earning a future stream of money. Growth stocks are particularly prone to the GFT, and "investing" might not be the best term to describe what buyers of AMZN are doing.

Except that every time they can, Amazon reduces their prices. Any investor who thinks that they will at some point increase margins doesn't listen to what Jeff Bezos says: we're good at running low margin businesses, and that's what we will continue to do.

Broadly speaking, there are two ways of increasing your net income(which, at the end of the day, is what investors care about): Increase your margins by charging more or spending less, or increasing your revenue by servicing new markets. In either case, the end result for the investors in the same. In the first case, they get a bigger piece of the pie. In the second, the pie is bigger, which means that their percentage is worth more.

Amazon's entire business model is currently focused on growth through new markets. Here, the idea is that you spend money to make more money in the future. The problem, from an investment perspective, isn't that Amazon's been successful at doing that. Their revenue shows that they've been wildly so. The real problem is that their net income has not been increasing at all (http://ycharts.com/companies/AMZN/net_income ). Since their costs currently aren't scaling well with revenue, it might become a major issue in the future for Amazon's investors.

The market has given Bezos 15 years so far, and to his credit, he's done an outstanding job. Revenue growth has been pretty good for the company, and they're pretty stable. He's managed expectations better than just about any CEO out there, since he's completely open about how his plan is to spend money now to make more money in the future. The market has been fine with that, so far. But there will be a point where the investors will want their investment in Amazon to give a decent return. The question is when that's going to happen, and whether or not Amazon can get all their ducks in a row before it finally does.

I agree with what Bezos has been saying and doing, but the main gist of the argument against Amazon is that investors seem to be expecting Amazon to bump prices and margins at some point, completely the opposite of what Bezos has been saying and doing. Perhaps he means what he says, and simply wants to be like a grocery store making 1-2% margins. Now when your revenue is $100 billion a year, that's not a lot of meat to justify high P/E ratios. And just like Apple is experiencing now with having huge revenue rates, eventually your growth will have to taper off.

In the same vein, profit by itself does not give you a complete picture. Obviously, the reason some people are still investing in Amazon is because they believe (rightly or wrongly) that Amazon will grow in the future. There are some plausible reasons this might be true: Amazon has been spending heavily on long-term investments like the Kindle (sort of like the Xbox was for Microsoft, before the Xbox 360) and expanding cloud computing capabilities. Time will tell.

Yes, Amazon will grow but as an ex-amazonian I can promise you that any profits the growth generates will just get turned into lower prices to drive more growth. Jeff has said in public he wants to have a company with $100 billion revenue, and I have no doubt he will get there the question is will the company make any money doing that.

Revenue growth is meaningless without profit. It's just a hook to hang lots of unproductive magical thinking on.

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