经济学人：亚马逊面临的挑战
The Economist, Jun 20, 2020
这一期的经济学人内容很赞（比前两期好得不少），其中有 2 篇对亚马逊的分析文章写的特别好：
- The genius of Amazon
- Amazon: And on the second day…
经济学人的观点是，亚马逊作为一家 25 年的公司，还在依旧保持着快速扩张和创新，是很成功的案例。 然而其当前和未来面对的挑战依旧很大。
2 篇文章从几个方面做了分析：
- 当前利润情况：零售利润微薄，云服务 AWS 和线上广告业务赚钱，但相比其负债来说，利润微不足道。
- AWS 在一个比较尴尬的位置，未来很有可能会分拆独立出亚马逊。
- 竞争者并没有变少：
- 科技方面的云服务竞争者，如微软 Azure；
- 区域性线上零售平台，如中国的淘宝、京东；老牌线下平台的新增线上服务，如沃尔玛；
- 创始人贝佐斯自己的精力也在投入到自己私有公司Blue Origin，且逐渐减少在亚马逊的管理操作职责，而只是监督；
- 企业口碑风险
- 作为零售平台，对驻扎在其平台上的商家不利的行为是，会倾向于优先销售自己公司的产品；
- 工人工作环境和工作压力；
- 管理层的政治。
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He argues that Amazon is in a perpetual virtuous circle in which it spends money to win market share and expands into adjacent industries.
Amazon’s role as a digital jack-of-all-trades creates conflicts of interest.
As a result, returns excluding AWS are puny and the pandemic is squeezing margins in e-commerce further.
Investors see this as an acceleration of a long-term trend towards life online from which the world will not turn back.
In the physical world, it has a logistics system second to none.
Now every big retailer will turn to the web as never before.
The AWS cloud is considered superior to the others in terms of reliability and speed. Azure experiences more service outages, for example.
If things get to the point where being inside Amazon is more disadvantage than advantage, says Mr Terry, AWS could go its own way.
Letting go of AWS would mark by far the most dramatic reorganisation in Amazon’s unremittingly accretive history.
And despite slowing growth it is still expanding twice as fast as the retail bit.
In time, the ad business might grow to fill that role.
Amazon’s meritocratic culture depends on “truth-seeking”, says a former senior executive. But it only works “if people at the top behave accordingly”, he adds.
He remains the company’s biggest shareholder—and thus the richest man in the world.
An AWS spin-off, if it occurred, might obviate the need for drastic antitrust action.
Not even the best magician can stop the passage of time.
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