I'm a bit uninformed on this, so bear with me here. If Amazon is making no "profit", that still means that its employees are getting paid, right? If the people working there are making money off of the business, what problem exists, exactly? Does it have to do with investor returns?
1) Bezos said: "Percentage margins are not one of the things we are seeking to optimize. It's the absolute dollar-free cash flow per share that you want to maximize, and if you can do that by lowering margins, we would do that. So if you could take the free cash flow, that's something that investors can spend. Investors can't spend percentage margins" (http://blogs.hbr.org/ideacast/2013/01/jeff-bezos-on-leading-...)
Those are some good links. Thanks. He's very savvy guy. Interesting how he chose to conclude the interview which was very clearly targeted towards the "investors" of Amazon as this:
"And the reason that I'm doing this interview with you is I want customers to understand what makes us tick, how we operate, what our principles are. I think customers want to know who they're doing business with."
Yes, employees are getting paid. It isn't even investor returns, because amazon's stock price has stayed pretty independent of profits. The only consequence of not turning a profit is that their cash reserves do not grow. Profit is really a pretty meaningless number.
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