On Monday, the price for a share of Amazon stock reached $1,000 for the first time since the company went public on the stock market in 1997. The stock returned to a price below the four digit threshold, finishing at $996.70 on Tuesday.
Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder and chief executive, is not over the top about the news and has dismissed near-term stock price swings. Bezos quoted investor Benjamin Graham who said “the market is a voting machine in the short run and a weighing machine in the long run.” Bezos wants to see long-term sustainable progress and investors rather than swings in the stock market.
Fortunate for Amazon, the company has made huge strides and has gained a lot of investor interest. It is now the fourth most valuable company in the world, surpassed only by Apple, Alphabet (Google’s parent company), and Microsoft. Amazon’s shares have gone up 33 percent in the past year and 368 percent in the past five years. Amazon crossing the $1,000 mark for its shares speaks to the growth of the e-commerce market. Online shopping has replaced a large amount of traditional retail, contributing to Amazon’s success. The company grew from $148 million in 1997 to $136 billion in revenue last year. Purchases made on Amazon accounted for 43 cents of every dollar spent online in the U.S. this past year.
Despite such a large expansion, there is still room for more growth. The e-commerce market only makes up 10 percent of total retail spending in the U.S. so Amazon has the potential to tap into the large remaining portion of retail spending and increase their revenues.
The upkeep of having a physical location, the cost of rent and other utilities has made it too expensive for many retailers to stay open. With more and more physical retailers closing up shop and filing for bankruptcy, e-commerce sites like Amazon continue to grow.
These promising numbers lead “stock analysts trying to find growth and return on investment in the retail sector today…putting their money into Amazon because that’s where they anticipate the growth coming from,” said Cooper Smith, an analyst at L2, a business intelligence firm.
Amazon has also shown grow in other sectors besides e-commerce. Amazon Web Services is the largest provider of cloud computing services. It is reeling in billions in information technology spending as the market shifts from traditional purchases of hardware and software to renting them in data centers. The profit margin for information technology is wider than that of retail, so the more Amazon expands into this field, the better.
Amazon has also been successful into its artificial intelligence venture. The popular Echo speaker device with its artificial intelligence assistant named Alexa has sold in the tens of millions. Echo has been so successful in fact that rival companies like Lenovo have tried to imitate the device.
Other companies like Alphabet, Apple, and Microsoft are also innovating to keep up with technological advancement while others like Hewlett-Packard and IBM struggle to adapt. Despite such high stock prices preventing many people from having the ability to invest in Amazon, Mr. Bezos does not have any plans to split the company’s stock to lower the price of the stock.
Featured Image via Flickr/MikeBlogs
