Will Amazon split itself in 2019. ? part 1

This is 1st in series of several articles, in case you are interested in the question from the headline — please be patient, it will be covered later on.

Disclaimer : this is not an invite to make any investment or any other decisions based on this article, nor this article’s purpose is to jump on bandwagon of critical comments towards Amazon after its stock plummeted 30% in last 3months…

Christmas shopping frenzy is over, and Amazon seems to have done it again. Record sales of Echo devices, millions of new Prime members (not subscribers, but let’s come back to this later) and all in all — Amazon dominated Santa’s shopping list. These results drive respect, envy and fear (just have a look what happens to the stocks in the sector where Amazon announces its entry…) of the behemoth that Bezos has built. He has the results to show that he had played the long term game successfully.

One problem though — all these information is coming in form of a PR statement, not official report. What is the difference? PR reports are lacking concrete and comparable numbers and actual insights… Few examples:

“This holiday season, tens of millions of people worldwide started Prime free trials or began paid memberships… “ ( when you sign a deal with largest Indian telco operator to bring all their high value customer in Prime for free — it should be enough to claim “millions of new Prime users” without actually doing anything for your existing paying customers

“It was a record holiday season for Amazon’s Kids Edition devices; customers purchased more Echo Dot Kids Edition and Fire Kids Edition tablets than ever before.” (“more than ever before” sounds like their sales numbers have gone through the roof, but actually we don’t know what is compared here… Year-on-year, vs.previous month, and how much is more — 1 / 1.000 / 1.000.000?)

But nevertheless — PR department has done its task masterfully — they didn’t provide many details, but manage to package the information in a format that is easily copied by news aggregators and distributed to broad audience. All major (non-tech) news outlets covered it, without any critical observation and thus making Amazon appear even more untouchable on the top…

Still, question arises — how sustainable Amazon’s business actually is ?