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Amazon and the "profitless business model" fallacy

eugenewei.com

41–50 of 141 posts

Re: Amazon and the "profitless business model" fallacy

#41
post #22

There are some issues with this explanation. The main issue is that the rules of accounting have a very good provision to take into account investing into the future. It is called capitalization. Thus, if a company spends money to build or acquire a new asset, it is called capital spending and it is not subtracted from the profits. Thus, for example, if a company had a million dollars of profit and decided to spend t…

That's all true, but Amazon is free cash flow positive. So it's not like they're making huge "losses" after deducting capex.

Re: Amazon and the "profitless business model" fallacy

#42
If you're not familiar with the "long-term" thinking of Bezos, this anecdote from Brad Stone's recent book on Amazon is particularly interesting:

Bezos wanted AWS to be a utility with discount rates, even if that meant losing money in the short term. Willem van Biljon, who worked with Chris Pinkham on EC2 and stayed for a few months after Pinkham quit in 2006, proposed pricing EC2 instances at fifteen cents an hour, a rate that he believed would allow the company to break even on the service. In an S Team meeting before EC2 launched, Bezos unilaterally revised that to ten cents. “You realize you could lose money on that for a long time,” van Biljon told him. “Great,” Bezos said.

Bezos believed his company had a natural advantage in its cost structure and ability to survive in the thin atmosphere of low-margin businesses. Companies like IBM, Microsoft, and Google, he suspected, would hesitate to get into such markets because it would depress their overall profit margins. Bill Miller, the chief investment officer at Legg Mason Capital Management and a major Amazon shareholder, asked Bezos at the time about the profitability prospects for AWS. Bezos predicted they would be good over the long term but said that he didn’t want to repeat “Steve Jobs’s mistake” of pricing the iPhone in a way that was so fantastically profitable that the smartphone market became a magnet for competition.

Re: Amazon and the "profitless business model" fallacy

#43
post #21
post #19

Would it be so terrible if Amazon just stayed as a break-even company forever?

Yes; everyone investing it would be wasting their money.

Not if Amazon decides to use some of it's free cash to buy back shares...

Share buybacks and dividends are the end game for all public companies. Profits don't mean anything if money isn't being returned to shareholders.

Amazon's generous valuation means that long-term investors think they'll continue to grow, and someday they'll return money to shareholders...

Re: Amazon and the "profitless business model" fallacy

#44
post #24

The author may not fully appreciate the long game Bezos has been uniquely blessed to play: the sooner Bezos can effectively expand what's working, without over-expanding, it's bootstrapping on a massive scale: buying speed without diluting ownership to even more money sooner. It's not deficit spending (until it is), it's reinvesting profit to grow assets that are the body of the money monster. (For Starcraft fans out…

> For Starcraft fans out there: It's like being broke because of focusing on building SCVs

While I personally play Protoss, I think this is an awesome way of thinking about it. "Keep your money low" is a mantra that you must remember when playing SC2, and I've always been curious how that translates to actual economics.

If I recall correctly, there was an actual paper written applying Starcraft economics to "real world" econ. Wonder if I can find it..

Re: Amazon and the "profitless business model" fallacy

#45
post #14

Strangly, this was the business model of cable companies for the longest time. They never turned a profit. When they expanded, they could use the increased income stream to go deeper into debt. The profits and extra capital went into more expansion. Eventually, they ran out of room to expand, and where are they now? Someday, Amazon will need to face the brutal reality of profit.

They ran out of room to expand and now they're regional monopolies, and can gouge their customers with impunity. Was that your point?

Re: Amazon and the "profitless business model" fallacy

#48
post #42

If you're not familiar with the "long-term" thinking of Bezos, this anecdote from Brad Stone's recent book on Amazon is particularly interesting: Bezos wanted AWS to be a utility with discount rates, even if that meant losing money in the short term. Willem van Biljon, who worked with Chris Pinkham on EC2 and stayed for a few months after Pinkham quit in 2006, proposed pricing EC2 instances at fifteen cents an hour,…

i'm a big fan of Bezos, honestly, but to say that pricing your products in such a way as to make >$100 billion in cash is a "mistake"... that's just crazy talk.

Re: Amazon and the "profitless business model" fallacy

#49
Great explanation, but I don't think this business model is incompatible with "flipping the switch" partially as Amazon already did. Examples: raising the minimum amount for free delivery from 25 to 35, or removing free delivery from Amazon UK to certain countries like Spain to avoid cannibalizing it's own business in those countries.

Re: Amazon and the "profitless business model" fallacy

#50
post #33
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you explain how capital expenditures do not affect profits? Doesn't capitalization just mean that expenses are applied over time? They don't disappear, correct?

Last quarter, Amazon had 834M of depreciation, and 281M of stock-based compensation: 1.1 billion of non-cash deductions from revenue. They made capital expenditures of 1.03 billion. They ended the quarter with about $100 million more cash than they started with.

281M of stock-based compensation ... ended the quarter with about $100 million more cash than they started with.

This looks like a loss to me. They could have sold $281M of stock and gotten $281M in cash; instead they ended up $181M short of that.

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