>I'll say this: Amazon Echo cut Apple's growth balls right off. That's a $2b revenue business Siri can kiss goodbye.
$2b is spare change for Apple -- I don't see Echo going places anyway, it will end more or less like the Kindle is now.
In fact, Amazon's whole profit was around $100 million last year -- and it's the first year it ever had any profit IIRC. I don't see those $100 million profit per year threatening the $18 BILLION profit per QUARTER anytime soon.
If you're talking about "threats," I don't see what retained earnings have to do with anything. Amazon's revenue is roughly half of what Apple's is -- Amazon is significantly smaller, but it's in same ballpark as Apple, not orders of magnitude smaller.
Amazon prices its products for thin margins and aggressively moves into new product spaces (sometimes with spectacular failures). Apple prices its products for thick margins and returns a lot of money to investors with stock buybacks. Using profits as a metric to compare these two companies holistically is specious.
>Amazon prices its products for thin margins and aggressively moves into new product spaces (sometimes with spectacular failures). Apple prices its products for thick margins and returns a lot of money to investors with stock buybacks. Using profits as a metric to compare these two companies holistically is specious.
I thought capitalism was a for-profit endeavour. Unless Amazon runs as a non-profit, it's just people investing in perpetuity based on pure belief/speculation of imagined future profit (and of course, on actual stock-based profits). Not that different from any pyramid scheme, which is why historically the stock market has periodical bubbles and crashes.
Those kind of rewards for the kind of actual prospects the company has are more or less a speculative bubble, with little basis on objective reality. $600 billion in "cash" on the other hand, that's something to keep you going and to talk about.
Apple could even get to be privately owned company with their buybacks -- Amazon wouldn't even stand a year as one at their churn rate.
>Amazon prices its products for thin margins and aggressively moves into new product spaces
Walmart does thin margins too -- but with huge revenues and profits compared to Amazon.
$2b is spare change for Apple -- I don't see Echo going places anyway, it will end more or less like the Kindle is now.
In fact, Amazon's whole profit was around $100 million last year -- and it's the first year it ever had any profit IIRC. I don't see those $100 million profit per year threatening the $18 BILLION profit per QUARTER anytime soon.