Monday, August 21, 2017

Amazon - Is investor confidence bordering on faith?

Amazon remains an intriguing phenomenon for me.  Let's start with the concept of "it's always Day 1." When asked about Day 2, Mr. Jeff Bezos, clearly one of the most original thinkers in business says he does not ever want to see Day 2 because it is the start of the decline.  That is a bold statement and one that, I'm convinced, he believes in. But in startup terms, Day 1 is the zone of investment, Day 2 onward is when you make profit.  So if Day 2 is going to be postponed forever, then the corollary is that they will never make money.  So Amazon believers have to subscribe to the notion that they will never ever be able to validate the hypothesis that revenue growth eventually leads to profit.  In that situation, one has to admit the _possibility_ that the Day 1 story is just that - a story, a good narrative which distracts from the fact that there is no way to make money within the Amazon model.

A second aspect of the intrigue for me is the belief that Amazon will grow its footprint in one low-margin business after another, they will then deliver the best customer experience in the world (which they routinely do), add more cost by delivering to the customer's home rather than get them to come to a distribution center, and somehow grow the margin while doing all that - unless they are allowed to get to a monopoly status and then gouge on price, it seems unlikely that they can become more profitable than, say, a Walmart or a Target.

There are many other such intriguing aspects but the aspect that concerns me most is that any Amazon believer's answer to "how will it work out in the end?" is without exception a variant of "Jeff Bezos knows what he is doing?" That seems as close to a faith-based answer as one can get in a market economy.  To me that is the worrisome aspect - that a lot of smart people are willingly substituting Mr. Bezos' judgment for their own.  It is not even group think; it is a one-man think.  And I worry that even a man clearly as brilliant as Mr. Bezos cannot prevail in a war of ideas against the rest of the innovation economy.