In 2014 I invested in Amazon.com (AMZN), much to the bewilderment of many of my clients. Even though the stock had fallen from more than $400 to below $300 per share, the consensus view was that the company was a money-losing unfocused endeavor that prioritized innovation over financial considerations. In many minds, there was no way to justify Amazon’s market value, so $280 per share was pretty much just as crazy as $400 per share.
Fast forward 30 months and Amazon shares trade in the mid 700’s. The company is reporting GAAP profits and still growing 20% per year. Prior skeptics missed several things, but at the core they did not account for the fact that Amazon sees no boundaries in terms of areas in which it will compete. The company was losing money in the accounting world, but in reality certain businesses were making money and those profits were being used to subsidize growth initiatives in other areas, some of which would fail and others that would succeed but not turn a profit on their own until years later.
We often hear growth investors focusing on a company’s total addressable market, or “TAM,” when trying to figure out how high a stock could go over a 5 or 10 year period when growth is more important to management than short-term profitability. Many Amazon investors try to gauge the company’s TAM by looking at the total retail market, and assuming e-commerce ultimately represents X percent of retail spending, and Amazon gets Y percent of that e-commerce market. That method of analysis would work for most companies, but not Amazon. The problem is that it implied that we know what categories will have an e-commerce component and that the e-commerce penetration of each category will remain somewhat consistent (such that we can predict what it will be).
Why is that problematic? Watch this video, unveiled today by Amazon:
You see, Amazon is not a traditional company. It is creating new businesses that don’t exist and it is re-imagining business models, like the convenience store. There is really no way to know what businesses Amazon will get into in the future. All we really know is that they are more willing than any other company on Earth to venture into something new that may or may not seem to make sense. This is why I believe within the next five years Amazon will become the most valuable U.S. company. There is nothing stopping them from growing because they never limit themselves.
The “Amazon Go” store you saw in the video (see the related Seattle Times article here) will open in 2017 in Seattle, about 10 miles from my house. I will eagerly await its arrival and share my initial experience when it opens. As for the stock, as the price warrants I will reduce my position over time (I already have sold some), but it is probably the only stock I have ever owned that I will continue to hold at least some of my shares almost no matter how high it goes. As long as I cannot predict where Amazon’s growth will take it in the future, it will be hard for me to confidently say the company is overvalued.
Full Disclosure: Long shares of Amazon at the time of writing, but positions may change at any time.