Yes, hooray!
Ironically self-aware eyeball-grab in progress?
Amazon has revenues under $100 billion a year. Walmart has revenues approaching $500 billion a year.
Which one is bigger, again?
Revenue is meaningless as a measure of value with regard to a corporation. It’s just an indicator that they’re doing business. The only thing that matters to stockholders is the public image of the corporation, and it’s ROI (almost completely determined by profits, the really important thing here). I could sell a hundred million widgets for $10 apiece, have a revenue of $1billion but still be in debt $200million if each widget happened to cost me $12 to even bring to market.
So what’s so special about revenue anyway? The more important factors are how many people are actually there, and how profitable the corporation is. Citing revenue for how a business is doing is like citing the features in a Hummer to indicate how big your dick is.
Ok. Amazon just reported a quarterly profit of 90 million. That’s one of the few times they’ve even recorded a profit. Walmart’s profit, actually net income, last quarter was 4 BILLION. Walmart is clearly the bigger company. Who cares about market cap? That’s a statistic used by gamblers. I mean investors.
I’ll admit I don’t know enough about either company to know why they are rivals in market share. I could only guess from my current knowledge. So I’m withdrawing from this conversation until I have at least read company histories etc. Then I could at least speak about facts and situations that are true.
I’m going to have to slap myself.
I just noticed that Rob used “bigger” in quotes in the title of this post. Clearly he is acknowledging the potential inaccuracy of that claim, and he did not need me to point it out.
it’s just two different modes of comparison. my wife is a rural letter carrier for the usps. i’ve been to conventions with her and listened to carriers comparing route size over drinks after the workshop sessions. some say their route is bigger because of the miles they drive, others say theirs is bigger because o how many boxes they service, while still others claim biggest because of the enormous volume factor on their route. there are number of ways of making a comparison and by this measure amazon wins.
not that i care greatly either way but that is what’s going on here.
Stock value has broken so far loose of real value that it has become at best a dark parallel universe which except for the few on top mostly adversely affects people in the real one. A good illustration of how the stock market works is http://agar.io
I think revenue is the better metric because there are far too many people manipulating the stock price for their own interest.And as we’ve learned from stock market bubbles, the stock price is a completely meaningless metric for judging a company’s size.
Revenue is better because that tells us that Walmart is the titan, not Amazon. There are many retailers with revenues in the same general range as Amazon, but no one has revenues like Wal;mart.
Honeycomb is big.
It’s impossible to stay on top with such bad lighting.
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
