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Comment by salvadors | Hacker News Reader

> He might even figure out how to do something he hasn't done at AMZN and that's turn a profit.

You mean like the $645MM profit they made in 2008, the $902MM profit they made in 2009, the $1.15BN profit in 2010, or $631MM profit in 2011?

Or is all that nullified by the $39MM loss in 2012 (due to LivingSocial)?

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considering they have a market cap of 137 billion, those are really tiny profits. Obviously the strategy at Amazon is to grow revenues and invest in the business, but that doesn't mean the parent is wrong. Amazon has essentially had no profit to speak of compared with their market cap over their entire company life. People investing in them have done so under the hope/expectation that once they reach their goal of ??? (world domination maybe?) the profits will be really big. That or they are just hoping a greater fool will buy their shares higher at some point in the future.

There was a very interessting article once (shame on me that I didn't bookmark it...) comparing the strategy of Apple and Amazon. Main point was that Amazon pursues a low (zero?) margin strategy.

Guess that's what commerce should be about, cash instead of margin. Aldi, a pretty big german discounter of grocceries, works that way and became huge. That they are loosing right now against "new" entrants is a different thing.

But having seen time and again profitable companies struggle in time of crisis simply because they run out of cash, I'd rather back a company like Amazon.

Was this the article that you were talking about?

http://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2012/11/28/amazon-and-margins

Yes, exactly that one! Thanks!

Growth is all that typically matters in the stock market. Investors really want to see this kind of steady increase in stock price, despite the difficult economic environment.

http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=AMZN+Interactive#symbol=A...

Unless you have some blue chip giving out dividends, no one cares much about profit.

Given how little tax they pay in the UK, I'm surprised it's not higher.

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