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

To: KeepItSimple who wrote (35283)	1/18/1999 10:39:00 AM
From: phbolton	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 164684

Holiday Use Sours a Few Consumers on Web Shopping By LESLIE KAUFMAN Amid post-Christmas giddiness about the stellar holiday drawing power of Web merchants like Amazon.com and portals like America Online, a survey to be released today found that while record numbers of Americans tried Internet shopping, they were not always happy with their experiences. Consumers who expressed satisfaction with their online shopping excursions dropped by 14 percentage points from six months earlier, although the vast majority -- 74 percent -- still considered it a positive experience, according to the survey, which was conducted by Jupiter Communications, a new-media research company in New York. nytimes.com

To: KeepItSimple who wrote (35283)	1/18/1999 11:20:00 AM
From: John Chen	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 164684

KeepItSimple,re:"The Casino For The Next 100 years" and you bet Mafia/ organized Slim will get into this legalized gambling business. Well, spectacular GAMES are on display everyday and no need to be at the crab-table to watch. The wonderful by-products of WEB.

To: KeepItSimple who wrote (35283)	1/18/1999 12:46:00 PM
From: Rob S.	Respond to of 164684

I like the way the author of this article directly related to the multiples of Barnes and BKS - that draws a clear distinction. Take the author's analysis and now let's suppose that the internet creates greater price comparison shopping than conventional shopping. After all, you don't have to gather Sunday newspapers and clip discount ads, join a book of the month club, or drive around the malls in order to comparison shop for something on the net. So maybe the IBM Research group, Georgia Tech Graduate Studies Department, and Aurthur Anderson studies have a common and common sense logic to them: The Internet is destined to spur a dramatic shift in how business is conducted but will also facilitate increased price competition that will inexorably drive down margins. After five or ten years you get the cake but it turns out to be a store-front fake made of plastic. So take the sales projections based on Amazon remaining the leader in on-line sales and then combine them with the reality of decreased margins (which we are already starting to see) and the truth reveals itself: Give Amazon sales of $8 billion in just five years and a reasonable profit margin of 1% and you get a profit of $80 million. So what if sales exceed that and grow to $120 billion? If you think that a profit margin of only 1% is unreasonably low, take a look at the average range of margins achieved by retail businesses WITHOUT the added mechanism of ease of competition found on the Internet. I think they will be lucky to average 1% - that's much better than the 22% losses they now have! Amazon is riding on the huge growth in Internut users, the phenomenal increase in the use of on-line brokers (leagalized gambling), the huge amount of publicity the Internet has attracted, and the tremendous bubble of liquidity that has fattened the accounts of millions of Americans and off-shore gamblers (ie investors). When the reality that Amazon is just a well-run, low-margin retail business and not the panacia speculators imagine, the stock will be lucky to attract 1/6th the current value. I think that day is at leaast three years away.