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Technology Stocks : Amazon.com, Inc. (AMZN) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Glenn D. Rudolph who wrote (113079)	12/20/2000 2:41:14 PM
From: Alomex	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 164684

upside.com Today Amazon (AMZN) opened a new bargain basement outlet store just in time to clear its excess inventory of Christmas lights, holiday music and unsold gifts. Excess inventory, what excess inventory? e-commerce companies do not carry inventories, thus their unmatched profitability potential. That is why Amazon is valued at several times old brick and mortar Sears.... Bzzwooa.... Sorry folks, I had a flashback as if suddenly was 1999.

To: Glenn D. Rudolph who wrote (113079)	12/20/2000 4:52:45 PM
From: GST	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 164684

Three people met on line today and decided that telling the truth and objecting to name calling were grounds for being banned from the "new economy" thread. I know that three people met because I was told those were the rules and I would cannot believe that grown men would lie about such things.

To: Glenn D. Rudolph who wrote (113079)	12/21/2000 11:44:59 AM
From: Alomex	Respond to of 164684

From the Motley Fool fool.com High margins and sustainable advantages go hand-in-hand. Amazon is not poised to have large amounts of either. Retailing is by nature low-margin and highly competitive. Several dozen large retailers compete for your retail dollars, and most of them are moving online (the large off-line names are steadily building websites). One of the most frequently used weapons in retailing is price, and the lower product pricing falls, the lower profit margins decline. In addition, online price wars are likely to be constant. Given its current business model, and even imagining potential variations on the current model (ad and referral revenue, for example), it is unlikely that Amazon will have profit margins much above 5%. (N.B. 3-6% has been my estimate for AMZN's long term profitability from the get go...) Now, high volume and efficient inventory management could still result in huge amounts of positive cash flow, which means that Amazon could still be a powerhouse -- just look at $200 billion Wal-Mart (NYSE: WMT) to see how that works. However, Amazon comes up short on other criteria, too. The company has more debt than equity (its equity balance is actually negative and it has $2 billion in long-term debt); Amazon's management has not addressed its Commerce Network losses (Pets.com, Living.com, etc.) as candidly as we'd like; also, the past two holiday seasons, Amazon has needed to fight to keep employees happy, so unionizing has been threatened.