Amazon's recent struggles in e-commerce are masking its continued dominance in the cloud. For investors, it's time to refocus. Amazon shares have never looked more attractive than they do right now.
Amazon.com has reported earnings about 100 times since it went public in 1997. Every one of those quarterly reports has shown a growing company, despite plenty of ups and downs in the economy -- and the internet. Amazon's worst quarter came in September 2001, when the internet bubble was blowing apart. Even then, revenue grew slightly from a year earlier. Now, though, Amazon's streak may be coming to an end.
When Amazon (AMZN) reports second-quarter earnings on July 28, Wall Street analysts expect revenue growth of just 5%. That's a tepid number by Amazon standards, and if things are just slightly worse than expected, revenue could actually decline. It would be a telling moment, with Amazon facing its greatest set of challenges since founder Jeff Bezos began selling books out of his house almost 30 years ago.
The company's longtime advantage in e-commerce has arguably become a weakness, with physical stores enjoying a post-Covid renaissance. Elevated fuel costs, meanwhile, are crimping Amazon's profits, with the cost of deliveries and returns on the rise.
Amazon's profit margins have never been rich, but analysts forecast a razor-thin 1.8% operating margin in the second quarter. After years of giving Amazon a pass on profits, investors have grown impatient. Since peaking last July, the stock is down 33% to a recent $125, shedding more than $600 billion in market value. Seen through the e-commerce lens, Amazon is one more struggling tech company.
And yet none of that should matter. Investors' preoccupation with Amazon's retail operations overlooks the company's transformation. This year, the Amazon Web Services cloud business will be about 15% of the company's total revenue but more than 100% of its profits. Before, during, and after pandemic lockdowns, AWS revenue grew at a 30%-plus quarterly clip. In the long term, those trends should continue.
Meanwhile, Amazon has an advertising business that has annualized revenue of close to $40 billion. That's nearly four times the size of Twitter (TWTR) and Snap $(SNAP)$ combined. And it's a media company that now controls the rights to a weekly National Football League game, a package that was once exclusive to broadcast giants Comcast $(CMCSA)$, Fox $(FOXA)$, Paramount Global (PARA), and Walt Disney $(DIS)$ . There's also a growing logistics operation that increasingly rivals FedEx $(FDX.AU)$ and United Parcel Service $(UPS)$.
The challenge for investors is that the sprawling operation has made Amazon difficult to value. It's worth the effort -- Amazon shares have rarely been more attractive. The stock could double, or triple, over the next few years. Yes, the latest quarter will be bad. But the future couldn't be brighter.
Gene Munster, a portfolio manager at Loup Ventures, says his firm has been adding to its Amazon position. While Munster concedes that investors are concerned about e-commerce profitability in the short run, he's convinced that in the long run, "no one is going to compete with Amazon" in online shopping. Munster figures that AWS and the ad business together will generate $45 billion in operating income this year. Value that at 25 times earnings, says Munster, and you get $1.1 trillion, which is just about the company's current total market value. That means investors are currently getting everything else free: online stores, Prime, logistics, Whole Foods Market, and a host of other businesses that Amazon has acquired over the years.
Says Munster: "It's hard not to like Amazon at this valuation."
To be sure, Amazon continues to face bad publicity. The company is pushing back against unions trying to organize Amazon workers, a difficult balance for a company that claims to be Earth's best employer. The company is also dealing with a newly empowered Federal Trade Commission led by Chair Lina Khan, who once wrote in the Yale Law Review that Amazon's dominant market position was clear evidence that U.S. antitrust laws weren't effectively regulating the U.S. internet sector. Amazon is sure to face intense government scrutiny for future acquisitions. And it could be forced to make concessions to the government.
For now, though, Amazon is still finding ways to grow through deals. Just this past week, the company agreed to buy One Medical, an owner of membership-based healthcare clinics, for $3.9 billion.
There's also a chance the slowing economy could weigh on AWS sales for the next few quarters. For this year, Wall Street currently expects total Amazon revenue of $520 billion, up 11%, with profits of 56 cents a share, down from $3.24 a year earlier.
But to Amazon bulls, the issues plaguing the company are fleeting and priced in. While the economy could fall into recession later this year or in 2023, that recession won't be permanent. Meanwhile, the e-commerce market continues to expand, and Amazon's slice of the pie remains vast, at about 40%. There's still room for additional market share gains, too.
The company's advertising business, meanwhile, is on the rise. Given Apple's $(AAPL)$ tough stance on sharing information about consumer activity on the iPhone, advertisers are looking beyond Meta Platforms' $(META.UK)$ Facebook, Alphabet's $(GOOGL)$ YouTube, and Snap for places to spend their ad dollars. Many ad buyers are turning to options where consumer buying intent is clear on the surface. Meta has to infer what you might want to buy; in Amazon's case, consumers type their exact shopping interests into a search box. In a marketplace crowded with consumer choice, Amazon's ad market is a gold mine.
And then there's Amazon Web Services, the company's mammoth cloud-computing platform. Since the company began breaking out results for AWS in 2015, the business has accounted for more than half of Amazon's operating profits, including almost 75% of the total in 2021. In 2022, with e-commerce operations likely to lose money, AWS is forecast to constitute 150% of Amazon's operating income.
With revenue close to $82 billion, AWS is one of the world's largest software and services companies -- bigger than Oracle $(ORCL)$, IBM $(IBM)$, or SAP $(SAP)$, and more than twice the size of Salesforce $(CRM.AU)$, the largest of the so-called software-as-a-service companies. And AWS is going to get a lot bigger. It's no wonder that when Bezos chose to step down as CEO in 2021, he chose as his successor AWS architect Andy Jassy. (Amazon declined to make Jassy or any other executives available for this story, citing the quiet period ahead of earnings.)
One of Wall Street's favorite strategies for assessing corporate value is a "sum of the parts" approach: Make a list of what the company owns, put a value on each part, then add it all up.
For some of Amazon's businesses, appropriate comparisons are hard to find. There are no pure-play public cloud stocks that look anything like AWS; its primary rivals -- Microsoft $(MSFT)$ Azure and Google Cloud -- are likewise buried inside large businesses. Amazon's ad business is valuable, but it's linked to the core e-commerce business and therefore defies an easy value.
Then there's Amazon Prime, which includes a Netflix-like video streaming service plus a Spotify-like music service. There are other businesses hidden in the company's financials, including the videogame streaming service Twitch, the audiobook company Audible, the podcasting producer Wondery, and autonomous-vehicle maker Zoox, just to name a few.
In reporting this story, Barron's found at least four different attempts by Wall Street analysts to suss out the company's true value. They involve different parts, different metrics, and varying conclusions. The only consistent theme? Amazon's parts add up to a lot more than its current market value.
Let's start with the entertainment-focused approach from Needham analyst Laura Martin. In her view, a large part of Amazon's value comes from its media businesses. She values Amazon Prime Video, Amazon Music, Twitch, and advertising at more than $500 billion. She values AWS at $650 billion. Those two numbers give you $1.15 trillion, or roughly Amazon's current market value. That doesn't include e-commerce, which Martin's calculations currently ignore.
Truist internet analyst Youssef Squali has a different approach. He puts a value of more than $500 billion on Amazon's "third-party retail" services business, which includes logistics and other services provided to millions of sellers. He adds $172 billion for "first party" retail -- Amazon-branded goods, including electronics like Fire TVs and Kindles, plus thousands of AmazonBasics products. He values the company's subscription business -- basically Prime -- at a little over $100 billion. Then, he values AWS at $867 billion, using a multiple of 30 times estimated pretax earnings for 2022. (Salesforce, which is growing more slowly than AWS, trades at roughly 30 times pretax earnings.) Ultimately, Squali comes up with an Amazon value of $1.7 trillion.
J.P. Morgan analyst Doug Anmuth takes the simplest view -- dividing Amazon into two pieces. He pegs the value of AWS at 20 times his estimate of $52 billion in 2023 earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization, or Ebitda, which comes to just over $1 trillion. For the retail business, he applies a multiple of 1.25 times his estimated gross merchandise value for 2023, which comes to just over $950 billion. Anmuth notes that Walmart $(WMT)$ trades at about one times GMV, while Amazon's retail business has "meaningfully higher" growth, meriting a higher multiple. For Anmuth, that's a total Amazon value of $2 trillion.