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by jethro_tell 1468 days ago
lol, most of amazon's money comes from things that weren't the core competency that they figured out how to do at scale.

The 'focus on your core competency' is for small companies on tight budgets with tight human resource capacity. When you have a few mil employees, email is a core competency, when you have a dozen, it's a pain in the ass. The same goes for AWS. def wasn't a core competency, but a huge part of the reason we can tell businesses to focus on core competencies is because amazon made SaaS, IaaS, PaaS a thing.

IDK about real estate. It probably makes sense to own your office buildings and warehouses at scale. They probably have a real estate team that's bigger than most companies that are 'focusing on core competencies' and it probably doesn't look too different than any super focused brokerage.

Once you hit scale, the money is in doing it in house. When you're paying by seat, it becomes a core competency about the time the cost to run a team of pros to do the same job is <= to paying per seat.

This may have been a misstep assuming that their pandemic growth would continue. I believe that's what they said in their last earnings call, something to the effect that they scaled quickly to address additional market capacity that was short lived.

Would assume they'll be just fine. Probably read the tea leaves wrong but I don't think this is getting off track and forgetting what they do to make money.

1 comments

What they could also do, if they don't want to ride commercial property prices, is bundle the property in a fund, and have it owned/managed by selling shares, but with the caveat that Amazon is effectively on 'rent control' and gets an infinite lease, until it decides to bail out.
What they will likely do, is stop buying property for a while and just wait it out until the need for the capacity is there.

They don't really need tricks, they can just keep growing the business or just sell it at a loss, write it off and move on.