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Amazon.com Announces Third Quarter Sales Up 34% to $43.7B

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Re: Amazon.com Announces Third Quarter Sales Up 34% to $43.7B

#51

Post by pwinnski »

bognition wrote: post #39
0xFFC wrote: post #37

I am very curious about Wallmart policies against Amazon growth. With this pace amazon will eat Wallmart eventually. And Wallmart is biggest company on earth. What they are going to do?

In many ways amazon has already eaten walmart. In what way is walmart the biggest company on the earth?

Walmart isn't the biggest company on earth by most means.

Last quarter, Walmart reported $31.8B profits on $123.4B earnings. For the similar quarter, Amazon reported $14.5B profits on $38.0B earnings. So Walmart dwarfed Amazon overall.

Amazon's fresh results are great, and it helps to close the gap between them, but they are still much smaller than Walmart.

Unless you're talking online-only, in which case the comparison switch around, and Amazon is already much bigger than Walmart. But Walmart's online sales are a small percent of their earnings.

Re: Amazon.com Announces Third Quarter Sales Up 34% to $43.7B

#52

Post by leggomylibro »

ryandrake wrote: post #38
leggomylibro wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdotally, I've started using Amazon FBA for things that I used to use eBay for. Say I want a 2.2" ILI9341-driven TFT screen. That's not exactly something that you need everyday, so I could go to AliExpress/Taobao and get N for $3 ea in ~3 weeks, or eBay to get one for $4-5 in a lottery of anywhere from 3 days to 2 months. But now, I can get one from Amazon for $10 tomorrow. It has prime shipping, which means you g…

Interesting--I've found myself switching the other way recently. I used to do a lot of purchasing on Amazon, but have moved more and more over to eBay. Prices tend to be better there, even on new items. No sales tax. Most sellers now offer free shipping, and you don't have to fill your cart to $50 or whatever it is to get it, and that free shipping isn't the "carried on the back of a mule" speed like Amazon's.

I can definitely see that; if you didn't have prime shipping, and more importantly imo, didn't live in a huge city where tons of items are deliverable to a plethora of nearby 'lockers' with 24-48-hour delivery. That probably has a lot to do with it, along with my experience that ebay is still pretty 'back of the mule' with shipping electronics internationally. Sometimes it's fast, but usually I forget I ordered something before it arrives.

But I do also order larger quantities of things from China, when I can plan ahead. I go to Amazon when I can't plan ahead, and more frequently these days, to get a working reference implementation up and running before I start running around making a BOM for a prototype. It's amazing how much time and money that can save you.

Re: Amazon.com Announces Third Quarter Sales Up 34% to $43.7B

#53

Post by adventured »

0xFFC wrote: post #37

I am very curious about Wallmart policies against Amazon growth. With this pace amazon will eat Wallmart eventually. And Wallmart is biggest company on earth. What they are going to do?

Walmart's online business is booming and its offline retail business is still four times the size of Amazon's retail business. Walmart's online retail business is about 30% the size of Amazon's and growing twice as fast. Walmart apparently isn't going quietly.

"The discount chain reported on Thursday that U.S. online sales rose a staggering 63% in the first fiscal quarter of the year, following last year’s overhaul of its online marketplace"

http://fortune.com/2017/05/18/walmart-online/

"Wal-Mart’s e-commerce sales grew an impressive 60% y-o-y in Q2."

https://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2017/08/18/e-...

Re: Amazon.com Announces Third Quarter Sales Up 34% to $43.7B

#54

Post by kgwgk »

alehul wrote: post #42
kgwgk wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> prefers to expense everything off What does that mean?

The sibling comment regarding avoiding a taxable income is correct. When a company makes a profit, it pays taxes on that income. The dividends are then either 1. distributed proportionally to the shareholders, or 2. reinvested into the company. The general idea is that reinvestment will generate more profit in the long term. In this case, the company reinvests the income into operations and growth during the next fis…

Good luck getting the IRS to accept that "good" accounting choice. In fact the reported statements can be different from those used to calculate the actual taxes paid. But even if the SEC is more flexible, there are still limits on what can be done. They are still reporting capex much higher than net income, if they expensed everything off they would be reporting billions in losses every quarter.

Re: Amazon.com Announces Third Quarter Sales Up 34% to $43.7B

#55

Post by whoisjuan »

hobofan wrote: post #40
mistermann wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not making money is a conscious choice. Growing this fast at scale is insane, Amazon scares me.

Out of all the big ones Amazon is the one I'd want the least to make much money. They just seem to have the least human view of their customers, with some products they've built completely centered around viewing their customers as consumer-machines.

Compared to Apple that artificially created a consumption cycle of one 700 USD (Now 1000 USD) device per year?

Re: Amazon.com Announces Third Quarter Sales Up 34% to $43.7B

#57

Post by Analemma_ »

tdb7893 wrote: post #11
rgbrenner wrote: post #10

Once again, AWS is the reason Amazon made any money at all. AWS earned $1.1B in profits for the quarter.. a 25% profit margin.

Hopefully with Microsoft and Google getting in the game we'll get some competition and that margin will reduce

I don't know... on Microsoft's earnings call today, a couple of finance suits specifically asked them about how they intend to grow cloud margins, so I don't think this is incoming. Amazon/Microsoft/Google tried a brief cloud price war a few years back and it all led to them being right back where they started, so I wonder if there's a MAD-ish incentive not to do that again.

Re: Amazon.com Announces Third Quarter Sales Up 34% to $43.7B

#59

Post by samfisher83 »

alehul wrote: post #15
rgbrenner wrote: post #10

Once again, AWS is the reason Amazon made any money at all. AWS earned $1.1B in profits for the quarter.. a 25% profit margin.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't that just due to their accounting preferences? Amazon has had the capability of making profit for years, but prefers to expense everything off in an effort to grow rather than pay increased taxes. Their skyrocketing market cap hasn't been due to a change in the company's direction so much as investors gradually realizing this strategy and the raw growth potential of where Amazon has…

You can't just expense stuff like that. For example you buy a warehouse you can't depreciate it all in one year. Retail is a competitive low margin business. Amazon has always had crazy P/E ratio. I could never really understand it. Maybe I could understand aws, but I can't understand the valuation of the core amazon business. Suppose amazon grows to the size of walmart. Walmart is only worth 260B, and they generate a ton more cash than amazon.

Re: Amazon.com Announces Third Quarter Sales Up 34% to $43.7B

#60

Post by notyourwork »

hobofan wrote: post #40
mistermann wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not making money is a conscious choice. Growing this fast at scale is insane, Amazon scares me.

Out of all the big ones Amazon is the one I'd want the least to make much money. They just seem to have the least human view of their customers, with some products they've built completely centered around viewing their customers as consumer-machines.

I find it interesting that you consider Amazon to have the least human view of customers when they are founded and based on the principle of customer obsession.
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