The Amazing ‘A’s

Amazon reported sales up 34% to $43.7 billion but said its profit was $256 million.

Alphabet reported profit of $6.73 billion on sales of $27.7 billion.

As well as looking for profit Alphabet is piling up cash – now over $100 billion.

Amazon, on the other hand, has always thought it best to use its cash by putting it into new businesses and minimise its reported profits.

An example of a business grown from nothing under this philosophy is AWS which had Q3 revenues of $4.58 billion although it was started only 11 years ago.

Another recent example is Amazon’s sally into the fruit and veg business via its acquisition of Whole Foods Market which contributed $1.3 billion to Amazon’s Q3 revenues.

Amazon now has 541,900 employees.

Amazon  has a market cap of $467 billion and Alphabet has a market cap of $680 billion. Along with Apple, which has a market cap of $813 billion, one of these three companies is likely to become the first trillion dollar market cap company.