And on the second day...
Earlier this year, The Economist wrote an article on how Seattle is the new epicenter of the tech world as products and business models move away from ads towards subscriptions, e-commerce, and cloud infrastructure.
Last week, they followed up with a deeper dive on Amazon’s incredible “Day One” run…
Amazon’s market cap doubled to $734B between 2016 and 2018. Since then it has close to doubled again. Its shares trade at 118x earnings, compared with 25-35x for Apple and Microsoft, the other members of the trillion-dollar-company club.
and the factors driving Amazon towards “Day Two.” The key risks they call out are:
- Conflicts of interest - Amazon competes with their third-party sellers. Retailers don’t trust their data with AWS.
- Bloating - Amazon has gone from asset-light to asset-heavy. Politicians want to break Amazon up.
- Competition - Amazon is seeing more competition in both retail and cloud. Competitors are beating Amazon internationally.
All valid points. But as big tech gets bigger and bigger, it seems like this list will be pretty similar for all of the big tech cos. (Just look at Apple’s App Store controversy last week.)
Anyway, it seems like investors aren’t too worried. If you ask Fortune 500 CEOs the question, “If you were going to invest in the stock of one company other than my own on the Fortune 500 today, who would it be?” The number one answer is still Amazon, followed by Microsoft and Apple!