Jeff Bezos Says Amazon Stock Is 'Not the Company'

so what propelled you to sell things more than books we after books we surged slime music and then we started selling videos and then I got smart and I emailed a thousand randomly selected customers and asked them besides the things we felt today what would you like to see a cell and that answer came back incredibly long-tailed the way they answered the question was with whatever they were looking for at that moment so like I remember one of the answers was I wish you've sold windshield wiper blades because I really need windshield wiper blades and I thought to myself we can sell anything this way and and then so then we launched electronics and toys and many other categories over time and the vision became because you read the original business plan it's just books your stock at one point I think went to $100 but then it went down to six or something like that at the peak of the internet bubble our stock peaked some around a hundred and thirteen dollars and then after the internet bubble you know busted open our stock went down to six and went from a hundred and thirteen to six in less than a year my annual shareholder that year starts with a one word sentence and that one word sentence is the word ouch so most of those internet companies of the dot-com era are out of business yeah you survived what was it that made you to survive and virtually the rest of them are gone oh it's very the whole period is very interesting because the stock is not the company and the company is not the stock and so as I watched the stock fall from 113 to six I was also watching all of our internal business metrics a number of customers profit per unit you know everything you can imagine defects etc every single thing about the business was getting better and fast and so as the stock price was going the wrong way everything inside the company was going the right way and I you know so I wasn't we didn't need to go back to the capital markets we didn't need more money the only reason you know a financial bust like the internet bubble bursting is you know it makes it really hard to raise money but you know we already had the money we needed so we just needed to continue to progress Wall Street kept saying well Amazon's not making any money they're just getting customers where the profits we're the profits and Wall Street kept beating you up on that and your response was I don't really care what you think Amazon was you know people always accuse us of selling dollar bills for ninety cents and said look anybody can do that and grow revenues that's not what we're doing we always had positive gross margins it's a fixed cost business and so what I could see is that from the internal metrics is that what at a certain volume level that we would cover our fixed costs and the company would be profitable

Channel: Bloomberg Television

Views: 66,880

Keywords: Bloomberg

Id: msFwJ5xpg_g

Length: 2min 51sec (171 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 20 2018