Amazon’s Business Is ‘Disappearing,’ Columbia’s Greenwald Says
December 1, 2011 — 11:25 AM EST
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2011-12-01/amazon-s-business-is-disappearing-columbia-s-greenwald-says
Amazon.com Inc. shares are overvalued because its core business of selling books and music online is “disappearing” and it’s competing with larger rival Apple Inc. in tablet devices, according to Columbia University’s Bruce C. Greenwald.
“Amazon trading at 100 times earnings is almost a joke,” Greenwald, a professor of management and asset management at the New York-based university, said today at the Bloomberg Hedge Fund Conference hosted by Bloomberg Link. “If Amazon doesn’t deliver profitability in the long run, it’s not going to stay at 100 times earnings.”
Amazon, based in Seattle, trades at 103 times reported earnings for the past year, down from this year’s peak of 129.8 in October, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The company’s shares gained 2.5 percent to $197.16 in New York trading, and have climbed 9.4 percent this year.
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Bruce Greenwald: Amazon Is Trading on Vapors
January 4, 2013 | Comments (3)
Bruce Greenwald: Now, Amazon I think is completely different. I think, if Apple is a current profit machine, Amazon is trading on vapors. [laughs]
They make no reported profit; the whole story is a growth story. They’re buying customers on the theory, presumably, that those customers are going to be profitable in the future. Now, for customers to be profitable you have to dominate segments.
The segment that Amazon has traditionally dominated is, of course, books, music, and video. Well, we know what happened to the music business when it went digital, which is the profit vanished and even Apple doesn’t make any money on iTunes.
http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2013/01/04/bruce-greenwald-amazon-is-trading-on-vapors.aspx
Amazon is on a p/e of 500 – but I’m happy to keep my shares
Amazon launched its first smartphone last week – the Amazon Fire phone.
It doesn’t represent any sort of leap forward in smartphone technology, according to reviews. So it probably won’t take a huge amount of market share from Apple or Samsung/Google.
Meanwhile, both Apple and Google are eating into one of Amazon’s traditional core businesses, selling music and video content.
So is Amazon’s new smartphone just a desperate bid to preserve market share? Or is it another ballsy, far-sighted move by Amazon’s boss, Jeff Bezos – one that will pay off in the end?
I think it’s the latter. And that’s why I’m willing to hang on to my Amazon shares – even although they trade on an eye-watering price/earnings ratio (P/E) of 500.
You might think I’m mad – but let me try to persuade you otherwise…
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For example, Bruce Greenwald, a finance professor at Columbia Business School, made some negative comments to the Guardian. “This sequence of crazy initiatives in areas where they have no competitive advantage is about sustaining an unsustainable stock price… Amazon owns the books market, but what is happening to the value of that monopoly? They have a core business in which they are dominant, it’s going away and they are thrashing around trying to justify their $150bn market capitalisation.”
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I’ll freely admit that Amazon is probably the highest-risk stock in my portfolio, but I’m happy to hold for further growth to come. And the Fire phone will play its part in achieving that growth.
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So what do YOU think? How would you value Amazon? What major adjustment would you need to make? What is the business trying to do?
If you need a hint: http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2014/9/4/why-amazon-has-no-profits-and-why-it-works
Does anyone want to bet $200 that Prof Greenwald will NEVER admit he might have miscalculated or misunderstood Amazon’s business?
What if he read their annual report: amazon-shareholderletter97
