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naraburns  nihil supernum  3yr ago (text post)   36874 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 28, 2022

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The weird thing is that Amazon's E-commerce arm isn't even that valuable. The bulk (maybe 80%) of Amazon's market value comes from AWS. E-commerce is now being recognized as a not-particularly-good business, and Amazon loses money on it.

So spending billions on a device that encourages buying stuff on Amazon wouldn't be a great idea even if it worked, which it doesn't.

The weird thing is that Amazon's E-commerce arm isn't even that valuable. The bulk (maybe 80%) of Amazon's market value comes from AWS. E-commerce is now being recognized as a not-particularly-good business, and Amazon loses money on it.

Source? According to Amazon's most recent annual report to the SEC (Ctrl-F "Note 10"), operating income was 18.5 billion $ (74.5 %) for AWS, 7.2 billion $ (29.2 %) for e-commerce in North America, and −0.9 billion $ (−3.7 %) for e-commerce outside North America. At least on the basis of those numbers, e-commerce does not look unprofitable.

Going off memory, last quarter they were negative profitability on non-AWS. Cash flow numbers are going to look even worse because of that ungodly capex.

Edit. Found the slides from their latest earnings. North American e-commerce segment had losses in each of the last 4 quarters, with the most recent quarter being -412 million. International might as well get axed. Earnings are hugely negative and getting worse. Last quarter was -2466 million. Maybe you are looking at older pandemic-era data?

In the document that I linked above, which is an official filing with the SEC, e-commerce in North America is shown as profitable (positive operating income: net sales minus operating expenses) in 2021, 2020, and 2019.

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