The Amazon revenue for the last reported full year was $524.897 billion. Walmart recorded $572.75 billion over the same period. Walmart market capitalization is $402.61 billion while Amazon’s is $1.3 trillion. In other words, even though Walmart generates more revenue, leading Fortune 500, Amazon is worth more by at least a factor of 4.
Indeed, there are many factors investors consider as they value companies, including growth rate, profitability, business model, margin – and revenue is just one of the components. How you make money, most times, is more important than how much money you have made!
Builders: re-check that business model, and re-examine why potential investors do not value the company higher. Look beyond your revenue to other indicators.
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Comment 1: Prof. Ndubuisi Ekekwe please elaborate a bit more on this statement you made, “How you make money, most times, is more important than how much money you have made!”.
Thanks for the daily loads of knowledge and learning you dish out here.
My Response: If you run a website and people come and buy things and go. And you make $10,000 monthly. Another makes a website and sells the same things you do. But his users are subscription customers and he is making $8,000 monthly. We will value his company more than yours because with the subscriptions, we see a customer-base (yours are consumers).
He can do many things to increase that subscription via loyalty programs, etc. Largely, even though you are making more money, your risk is higher and your growth paths are not clear. But the subscription competitor is well positioned. So, how he is making money has been considered to be more important besides the amount of money made during the company valuation.
Comment 2: The valuation could potentially be different if Amazon is disaggregated into separate business units. I would wager that the valuation of e-commerce/retail business,as a standalone business, may be at parity with Walmart. I would not be surprised if the market has priced in the valuation of the cloud service business in the overall valuation of Amazon.
My Response:Market did price AWS and that is part of the conversation. But developing AWS without the one oasis of ecommerce would have been impossible! I explain here https://www.tekedia.com/capture-value-even-as-you-deliver-value-to-customers/
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