Why is Amazon all of a sudden not re-investing all its profits?

Post by TimPrice » Fri, Apr 29, 2016, 10:14 PM UTC

pbreit wrote: post #35

ChuckMcM wrote: post #19

Frankly I'm surprised this hasn't happened sooner. So much money is sloshing through Amazon these days, keeping it balanced to the point where you don't let it accumulate (generating profit) or flow to fast (generating loss) has got to be scary complex. At every large company I've worked at there are things on the balance sheet that are "tunable" by management which helps with this. It was a running joke inside Netwo…

Bezos is in it for the long haul. He's probably the most impressive business person there is right now. Buffett and Musk are impressive in different ways.

Post by hkmurakami » Fri, Apr 29, 2016, 10:53 PM UTC

ChuckMcM wrote: post #45

rodionos wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this "tuning" typically done on the revenue side or the cost side? I'm surprised it's at all possible with proper revenue and cost recognition policies in place.

At Sun there was literally a taped square on the floor of the factory, and things in that square were "shipped" to as the quarter was finishing up the factory would figure out how much had to be shipped to make the numbers, and they would process enough orders to make that happen. If there weren't orders, then some "one time deals" would be mentioned to top customers who might get a really nice discount or something.…

Post by hkmurakami » Fri, Apr 29, 2016, 10:55 PM UTC

SEMW wrote: post #27

andr wrote: post #25

I find it very interesting to know what Amazon's competitive advantage would be from having their own logistics business. 1) Shipping is the definition of a commoditized business. Unlike AWS, for example, they will not be pioneering a new business model or technology. 2) What they pay right now to FedEx, UPS, USPS, DHL, OnTrac, etc. should be very close to zero margin, given their position to negotiate those companie…

> Shipping is the definition of a commoditized business. Unlike AWS, for example, they will not be pioneering a new business model or technology. I'm guessing it's the one-hour-delivery thing - last year they started testing one hour delivery for popular products in a couple of pilot cities.[0] Presumably they can't do one hour delivery with a traditional model of centralised-warehouse -> shipping company -> shipping…

Post by Spooky23 » Fri, Apr 29, 2016, 11:03 PM UTC

rgbrgb wrote: post #88

brightball wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Employee count should get some heavy value since the real benefit to society from most companies comes from payouts to the rest of the economy via payroll and stock. Unless we're enabling larger ecosystems around what they've done that creates even more. So far I'm seeing very little in terms of ecosystem around Musk's companies. On the contrary, he seems more focussed on doing exactly the opposite (like Tesla's focu…

That's kind of a 0-sum outlook on the role of businesses in society (gather wealth to distribute to employees). Most of the businesses we're talking about are benefiting society not through job creation but through technology creation. Google is not important because they employ tens of thousands of engineers, they're important because Search benefits general knowledge and decision making of everyone with an internet…

Post by takno » Fri, Apr 29, 2016, 11:32 PM UTC

brightball wrote: post #81

benologist wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bezos is a much more accomplished business man - Tesla has ~3,000 employees SpaceX has ~5,000 Solar City has ~13,000 PayPal has ~13,000 Total: 34,000 as they stand today which is a very generous measure since it's years after Musk left PayPal and he doesn't even work at Solar City afaik. Amazon has ~222,000 employees, roughly 8x larger than all of those companies combined, not even counting Blue Origin, WaPo, or w/e…

Employee count should get some heavy value since the real benefit to society from most companies comes from payouts to the rest of the economy via payroll and stock. Unless we're enabling larger ecosystems around what they've done that creates even more. So far I'm seeing very little in terms of ecosystem around Musk's companies. On the contrary, he seems more focussed on doing exactly the opposite (like Tesla's focu…