Amazon Profitability Strategy
The cluster discusses Amazon's intentional low or zero overall profits through heavy reinvestment in growth and CapEx, with AWS as the primary profit source while retail operates at slim or negative margins.
Activity Over Time
Top Contributors
Keywords
Sample Comments
The only thing amazon seems to profit on is AWS
Amazon is sort of an outlier- they could be profitable if they wanted to be, but they would rather eat the world.
Amazon was profitable, they just prioritized scaling up so they reinvested all profits.
Amazon is not profitable. AWS is.
The profitable part of Amazon is AWS, their platform. Retail is loosing money
This is due to Amazon purposefully keeping gross profits at $0 for years. The CapEX investment was through the roof; investments such as AWS which were criticized heavily in their infancy. It was widely known Amazon would be able to turn a profit, they decided to ruthlessly expand their enterprise.
Any reason why Amazon is now making so much profits? Have they ran out of things to invest on?
Still very relevant: http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2014/9/4/why-amazon-has-n...
Amazon simply does not need to have cash on hand. They can attain massive profits at literally any point by just increasing their margins ever so slightly across whatever business lines they operate in. This is the benefit of the scale they operate at.
You're missing that Amazon is reinvesting, not hiding profit.