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

To: Victor Lazlo who wrote (6026)	6/15/1998 8:48:00 AM
From: Glenn D. Rudolph	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 164684

orry jawd. The internet will not change math. A loss is a loss. I tend to agree with this<VBG> Glenn

To: Victor Lazlo who wrote (6026)	6/15/1998 1:25:00 PM
From: Charlie J	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 164684

<<A loss is a loss>> True indeed, but there seems to be an assumption here that Amazon, and maybe other internet retailers as well, can't ever get to profitability. I don't understand this thinking. The financial community is clearly giving internet retailers the message right now that what is important is to grow the business and the brand, not profits. These companies are being told by the financial markets to go out and establish their companies as the leaders. In this environment, they would actually be stupid to do otherwise. So, the companies raise money and spend it to grow the business. Spending the money that they raise produces losses. But this is exactly what they are supposed to be doing in their early stages. I know of an internet retailer (a private company) that is growing rapidly. They know how they could ratchet down to profitability very quickly, but choose not to do so at this time, because it would dramatically slow down the growth. It is not uncommon for businesses to go through some period of time where they are not yet profitable. (If this were never the case, the notion of 'investors' wouldn't even exist.) Just look at the biotech world and how it is financed. Both the private and public markets are willing to invest money in these types of startups right now. The idea is to use that money to build a big business that will become very valuable over time and produce a good return on the investment. Some will make it and the investors will prosper. Some will not, and the investors will lose. 'Amazon has losses, Amazon has losses.' Uh, we noticed that already. The posts here that claim Amazon will die as a company are sophomoric. First, it is too early to tell and second, if anyone has done a good job of establishing the brand and bringing traffic to its web site, it's Amazon. So they are one of the least likely to fail as a web retailer. Thus, saying that they will fail is basically saying that web retailing will fail. And that, my friends, is probably a losing argument.