91–100 of 103 posts
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Do you know Amazons order page lets you see how many orders you place each year? It is quite telling: 2007, 2008, 2009 were 2016: 270... It's all about establishing the habits.
They also have a page to generate CSV reports on your purchases. I noticed the wife and I spent well over $10k in last 12 months. Up 2× or 3× since last year!
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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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you know Amazons order page lets you see how many orders you place each year? It is quite telling: 2007, 2008, 2009 were 2016: 270... It's all about establishing the habits.
They also have a page to generate CSV reports on your purchases. I noticed the wife and I spent well over $10k in last 12 months. Up 2× or 3× since last year!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They also have a page to generate CSV reports on your purchases. I noticed the wife and I spent well over $10k in last 12 months. Up 2× or 3× since last year!
Where abouts is that page? Do you have a URL?
https://www.amazon.com/gp/b2b/reports
What a really great feature and cheers to amazon for having something like this available.
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Where abouts is that page? Do you have a URL?
Here is a url https://www.amazon.com/gp/b2b/reports What a really great feature and cheers to amazon for having something like this available.
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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…
Company A grows revenues at %5 per annum. Company B grows revenues at %4.9 per annum. In both cases the trend is equally likely to continue in perpetuity. And neither company is expected to ever pay dividends. Which stock are people going to buy? _Everybody_ is going to buy Company A's stock and _nobody_ is going to buy Company B's stock. P/E doesn't matter because 1) no dividends and 2) it's not a proxy for relative…
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Question is whether those companies will culturally be able to compete in a low-margin space. I don't know anything about Microsoft but wrt Google I've often thought that the insane margins on the search ads business have made it institutionally difficult for the company to take any low-margin business seriously. Amazon on the other hand has been all about razor thin margins since day one.
> Question is whether those companies will culturally be able to compete in a low-margin space. 25% is a fat margin: why would you say this is a low-margin space?
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Company A grows revenues at %5 per annum. Company B grows revenues at %4.9 per annum. In both cases the trend is equally likely to continue in perpetuity. And neither company is expected to ever pay dividends. Which stock are people going to buy? _Everybody_ is going to buy Company A's stock and _nobody_ is going to buy Company B's stock. P/E doesn't matter because 1) no dividends and 2) it's not a proxy for relative…
Walmart is a 500 billion dollar company. Even 1% growth is 5 billion in revenue. They are asymptotic to the US economy growth which isn't growing much.
The huge absolute revenues of Wal-Mart do suggest that revenue growth opportunities are structurally limited by the size of the domestic economy. But then again, unless and until every brick & mortar store in the U.S. says "Wal-Mart", they could still grow. That sounds unreasonable, but it's basically how people see Amazon: capable of growing revenues in large part by capturing existing markets, and being able to do that for the foreseeable future.
You said you could never understand why Amazon attracts so much investment despite their P/E and despite the poor margins of the retail industry. I realize you probably said that rhetorically, but in any event my point was simply that profit margins don't matter; what attracts investment is revenue growth. I'm sure there are many reasons--some rational (the corollary of revenue growth is growing marginal profit _potential_), some not--but it is what it is. And it's pretty much how investment has always worked.
Indicators like P/E only matter because of what they signal about future revenue growth. A poor P/E often suggests poor capacity for growing revenue. It's a heuristic, and if more direct evidence gives you reason to believe otherwise then you discount the predictive value of the P/E metric accordingly.
I suppose another way of looking at it is that Wal-Mart is at the phase where they're capturing profits, not growth. Their profit taking years were priced into their stock during the growth period; as they grew revenue their potential for future profits grew and this was immediately reflected in their stock price. If you look at the financial graphs, their stock price has remained steady with their revenue. When overall revenue declined the stock price dropped sharply, because revenue decline implies a decline in future profits and markets will quickly price future prospects into today's stock price. So in the language of "fundamentals" investing, profits are ultimately what matter; but _future_ profits, not today's profits. Future profits is just another way of saying profit potential; and the best indicator of profit potential is today's revenue growth.