The king of ecommerce yields his throne
Way too lit for a Tuesday... Amazon dropped two major bombshells in its 2020 fourth quarter earnings yesterday. First, the numbers: the Zon brought in a record-smashing $125.6B in sales, up from $87.4B in the same quarter of 2019. That's even more than Apple (aka: the most valuable company on Earth) did in sales last quarter. Profit more than doubled from a year earlier to $7.2B (smaller than Apple's — but still massive).
The bigger story... While Amazon's numbers are eye-popping, we're not shocked that Earth's biggest online retailer had a blowout holiday quarter... during a deadly pandemic. The real surprise: Jeff Bezos is stepping down as CEO.
"A yawn is the greatest compliment"... that an inventor can receive. That was Bezos' mic drop blurb post-announcement. From 1-Click ordering, to two-day shipping — 20 years ago, we couldn't have imagined these being a norm for us. Bezos’ point: if you do innovation right, then the extraordinary becomes the ordinary. Investors also yawned at Bezos leaving, with the stock barely budging after-hours. It's a vote of confidence that the empire he built is strong enough to stand without him front-and-center.