Amazon 1 Quarter 2020 Key takeaways:

We are the Borg. You will be assimilated.

It is hard to keep track of all of Amazon’s moves, particularly in this crisis which seeds even greater asymmetric advantage to one of the largest organizations in the world today.

We can no longer just report on financials – but let’s start there as a baseline. While the company reported greater revenues than expected by analysts Bezos told investors to “take a seat.” Why? Because the expected $4 billion in upcoming expected profit would be earmarked for spending on the crisis response. Worker extra pay, PPE, diagnostics, other big things. 

Advantage, Amazon, although investors reacted by bringing the stock down a bit it’s always been an Amazon game to focus on growth heft and scale at the expense of shareholder returns. 

AWS, their profit engine, continues to grow, maintaining their leadership position in the cloud space which can only be expected to expand further. This profit engine for Amazon will fuel other flywheels of growth for the company to take greater advantage – books, streaming, logistics, gaming – all expected to grow and expand along with the % of earthly humans who pay to be a customer of the company in the form of Amazon Prime. 

We now must take a look at how Amazon is engaging government stakeholders. 

At the national government level – Trump has been sparring with Amazon over their role in relationship to the postal service which has already eclipsed the size and scale of last mile delivery.

Congress issued an invitation to Bezos to testify to clear up discrepancies between what the company claims it does with third party data of resellers, and what certain employees told the Wall Street Journal that they actually might be doing with that data. 

 At the international level, the WHO invited Amazon to jump in and aid with the development of a mass diagnostics development response.

Essentially, Amazon is now positioning itself as so essential to keeping stuff moving and people fed that we would never dream of breaking up the company now. So as Bezos says in the shareholder update, 

“Reflect on this from Theodor Seuss Geisel: 

‘When something bad happens you have three choices. You can either let it define you, let it destroy you, or you can let it strengthen you.’

I am very optimistic about which of these civilization is going to choose.”

Jeffery P. Bezos, 

Founder and CEO, Amazon

in sum i suppose we must be optimistic that Amazon is choosing to be strengthened by this crisis, and will only get bigger.