VALUE: After Hours (S08 E12): Why Amazon Is Still a Hidden Value Play

During their recent episode, Taylor, Carlisle, and Charles Lemonides discussed Why Amazon Is Still a Hidden Value Play. Here’s an excerpt from the episode:

[Charles] Look, it’s a two-ish trillion dollar equity cap right now. And you could easily say their businesses are worth $3 trillion. You could probably make a case for higher.

And they’re great, great businesses. Their media business is super solid. Their retail business is super solid.

And AWS may only be growing at 22% a year or whatever it is. But man, is it growing. And man, do they have unlimited demand.

Obviously, it’s one of the leading technology companies in the history of the world. Obviously, it’s been one of the best run businesses in the history of the world. The stock has been dead money for a long time.

I mean, pull up a chart. No one’s made money in this thing for, I don’t know, five years or something. And that is not because they’ve done badly from an execution point over the past five years.

It’s really not. It’s because five years ago, the stock got ahead of itself. It was a huge, huge run.

And it got to be really, really expensive. So it’s taken several years for the company to grow into that market cap. They’ve now grown into that market cap as far as I’m concerned.

And again, it’s a sum of the parts story. And the parts are worth $3 trillion. And you’re paying too.

[Tobias] What do you think about Bezos sort of stepping back? Looks like he’s now raising a private equity fund of $100 billion to chase something. I mean, he’s not Amazon anymore, but I’m just sort of interested.

[Charles] He has done an incredible job of building a very complex organisation with a lot of people in it that are doing really well. And it’s not a cult of personality, and it’s not all about him, and it’s not Steve Jobs making or what it was. Bezos got you here.

But for the past, I don’t know, five, seven years, it’s been a big team of people executing. There’s no question he was incredibly impactful and very, very smart about business strategies. And he’s still there to do that.

And I don’t think he’s uninvolved in Amazon by any stretch. But I don’t think he needs to be there on the day-to-day in any one of their businesses.

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VALUE: After Hours (S08 E12): Why Amazon Is Still a Hidden Value Play

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