Quote:
Originally Posted by lumpynose
I suppose they could break up Amazon since it is becoming a monopoly. Like they did when they broke up Bell Telephone. For those who aren't old enough to remember those days, Bell Telephone provided the phones for the entire US, except for tiny pockets here and there.
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They could...
...if they only looked at online sales.
They won't because internet-only sales is but a small part of Amazon (not even the most important anymore) and onlines sales are a small part of US retail.
Here:
https://techcrunch.com/2009/07/27/co...ts-visualized/
And that was ten years ago.
Today they account for 50% of online but only 5% of total retail.
https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/13/am...-retail-spend/
Nobody is going to call even 50% a monopoly, much less 5%.
When it comes to total retail sales Wal-Mart ($500B) is much bigger than Amazon 9$300B) yet nobody has gone after them as a "monopoly" and 90% of all retail is B&M, Wal-Mart 's stronghold.
Griping about Amazon over the "piddly" publishing market is losing perspective over the role of publishing in the real world.
Try this:
Total US publishing runs around $27Billion a year. Big, right? (Includes higher education, corporate, k-11, and trade).
Nope.
Total US retail runs $5-6 trillion a year. And growing. By more than the size of the entire publishing industry (5-10x actually) every year. Both past and projected.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/...-retail-sales/
Yeah, Amazon is big at around $300Billion. But Wal-Mart is bigger at $500M and both are barely noticeable in the overall retail picture.
And publishing? It's maybe 5% of Amazon's gross and even less of it's profits, which mostly comes from AWS.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/all-of...omes-from-aws/
Amazon typically invests its profits into growing the company instead of reporting it as taxable income but AWS is producing more they can spend. About $5B a year in income out of around $20B in sales. In a couple more years AWS will be bigger than all US publishing. And they might not even be tops in cloud computing. A toss-up between them and Azure, profit wise.
Amazon plays in a whole different league.
Their numbers don't mean what the publishing media makes them out to be.
They're big and they're profitable but they need to be big to play with the big boys.