A Price Amazon Is Content to Keep High: $1,000 a Share -
By NICK WINGFIELDMAY 30, 2017
Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder and chief executive, has been dismissive of the preoccupation with near-term stock price swings, often quoting
the influential investor Benjamin Graham, who said the market is a voting machine in the short run and a weighing machine in the long run.
Even with all of Amazon’s staggering growth — $136 billion in revenue last year, compared with $148 million in 1997 — e-commerce
still represents only around 10 percent of total retail spending in the United States, the company’s most mature market.
“For any stock analyst trying to find growth and return on investment in the retail sector today, they’re clearly putting money into Amazon
because that’s where they anticipate the growth coming from,” said Cooper Smith, an analyst at L2, a retail research firm.
Crossing the $1,000 mark, said Christian Magoon, chief executive of Amplify ETFs, which includes a fund
that holds Amazon shares, “speaks to the triumph of e-commerce and the vision of Jeff Bezos.”
The investor optimism about Amazon is, in many respects, unchanged from when it went public in 1997.
Amazon’s shares are up almost 33 percent for the year and up 368 percent over five years.
That leaves Amazon — which accounted for 43 cents of every dollar spent online in the United
States last year, according to Slice Intelligence — with a lot of room to grow.
Tech companies make up the five most valuable companies in the world by market capitalization.
