In reporting this story, Barron’s found at least four different attempts by Wall Street analysts to suss out the company’s true value. There are other businesses hidden in the company’s financials, including the videogame streaming service Twitch, the audiobook company Audible, the podcasting producer Wondery, and autonomous-vehicle maker Zoox, just to name a few.
Then there’s Amazon Prime, which includes a Netflix-like video streaming service plus a Spotify-like music service. Amazon’s ad business is valuable, but it’s linked to the core e-commerce business and therefore defies an easy value. (MSFT) Azure and Google Cloud-are likewise buried inside large businesses. There are no pure-play public cloud stocks that look anything like AWS its primary rivals. One of Wall Street’s favorite strategies for assessing corporate value is a “sum of the parts” approach: Make a list of what the company owns, put a value on each part, then add it all up.įor some of Amazon’s businesses, appropriate comparisons are hard to find. And it could be forced to make concessions to the government. Amazon is sure to face intense government scrutiny for future acquisitions.
antitrust laws weren’t effectively regulating the U.S. The company is also dealing with a newly empowered Federal Trade Commission led by Chair Lina Khan, who once wrote in the Yale Law Review that Amazon’s dominant market position was clear evidence that U.S. The company is pushing back against unions trying to organize Amazon workers, a difficult balance for a company that claims to be Earth’s best employer. To be sure, Amazon continues to face bad publicity. NA=not available *Estimated purchase price IMDB purchase price included booksellers Bookpages and Telebook. Here are a dozen of the more important ones that often get overlooked. But the future couldn’t be brighter.Īmazon’s Other Bets While Whole Foods Market is Amazon’s largest and most notable acquisition-it spent $13.2 billion on the grocer in 2017-the company has made many acquisitions over the years. The stock could double, or triple, over the next few years. It’s worth the effort-Amazon shares have rarely been more attractive. The challenge for investors is that the sprawling operation has made Amazon difficult to value. There’s also a growing logistics operation that increasingly rivals And it’s a media company that now controls the rights to a weekly National Football League game, a package that was once exclusive to broadcast giants Meanwhile, Amazon has an advertising business that has annualized revenue of close to $40 billion.