[proust]

What I don’t get was how Amazon was able to operate for 20 years without making a profit in a supposed free market. They undercut brick and mortar stores and put them out of business.

[redgolum]

Because they really did make a profit, but plowed it all back into the business.

[Alberta's Child]

That's one of the problems with any "virtual business." As strange as it may sound, even a monopoly has a hard time making a profit in that type of business. The cost of entry is so low that even a company with a 100% market share has to compete against itself.

As soon as I saw that Amazon was starting to expand its operation to include its own delivery vehicles I knew the company was in trouble. If a country with such huge volumes of freight can't even make money with FedEx and UPS competing for its business, what makes it think it can do that "last-mile" delivery process any more efficiently than those giants in the shipping business?

[Boogieman]

“What I don’t get was how Amazon was able to operate for 20 years without making a profit in a supposed free market.”

In a free market, venture capitalists and stock speculators are free to subsidize a non-profitable company that they believe will be profitable in the future.

[discostu]

The reason they don’t “make a profit” is they reinvest everything. They actually make quite a bit of profit, they just don’t believe money in the bank is worth anything, so it doesn’t sit there and book as profit, it all goes into expansion.

[Captain Peter Blood]

They really don’t make a profit now. A few quarters ago they were taking money from CapEx to show a profit. They have never paid any dividends either.