Comment by vidarh
3 days ago
Can you explain? Amazon is wildly profitable, and while AWS is far higher margin than their retail businesses, everything I can find suggests their retail segment also has a healthy operating margin.
3 days ago
Can you explain? Amazon is wildly profitable, and while AWS is far higher margin than their retail businesses, everything I can find suggests their retail segment also has a healthy operating margin.
If you put all of the money Amazon as a whole has taken since it was founded in 1994 in a stack on the left, and all of the money Amazon as a whole has spent since then in a stack on the right, the stack on the left is slightly larger, but this has only been true for a couple of years now.
It's the difference in 1990s billionaires and 2020s billionaires. Bill Gates was so rich because he owned a lot of Microsoft shares and received profits from those shares as dividends. Jeff Bezos is so rich because he owns a lot of Amazon shares and people keep being willing to pay more and more for those shares so his notional net worth increases (AMZN has never paid a dividend).
None of which supports the argument of the person I replied to that what you buy from them today is somehow "subsidised by imaginary money"
> his notional net worth increases (AMZN has never paid a dividend).
But that’s exactly the loophole: you can borrow for very cheap against this notional equity without incurring a cent in taxes (since divodends are never paid out)
Can you share numbers? What are Amazon’s margins?
Across the board they're about 11%, I believe, though retail seems to be about 5% despite being the bulk of revenue. AWS has far higher margins.