FYI: Evidence of the demise of the U.S. retail industry is clear in almost every household. It exists in every neighborhood, even in the White House, and it was clear again Thursday.
That’s when Amazon.com Inc. AMZN, +4.94% reported first-quarter earnings. And we learned just how big the pressure is. Seattle-based Amazon, which is defined as a retail powerhouse on Wall Street, loses money from its retail business. In order to compete, other retailers must be willing to lose money too.
According to Amazon’s earnings report, revenues were $51 billion and earnings were $1.9 billion, creating a profit margin of only 3.7%. That is very low, but it gets worse when you look at retail by itself.
Specifically, we will remove Amazon Web Services (AWS) — its cloud business — and Prime to quantify this.
Regards,
Ted
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/is-amazon-a-fundamentally-unfair-company-it-certainly-looks-that-way-2018-04-27/print
