October 20, 2015

When you decide to go the focused-investor route one of the necessary components to your job is to thoroughly research companies and act as though you are buying them entirely, just like a Warren Buffett type. Lately this company has been on my mind, so let’s take a moment to examine one of the greatest inventions of our generation: The e-commerce company Amazon.com. In July 1995 our lives would change forever and the days of pushing rickety shopping carts at break-neck speeds over other human beings in order to get the hottest deal would be over. Most importantly, who is the genius pioneer behind this e-commerce and cloud computing powerhouse, and why does it matter?

The founder and CEO is Jeff Bezos and he remains in charge of his e-commerce giant. It’s common knowledge that if the founder sticks around and continues to innovate and push boundaries, the company has much more room to grow and conquer. Bezos hails from Albuquerque, New Mexico and spent much of his youth working on a family ranch where he was busy “laying pipe, vaccinating cattle and fixing windmills”. When the college years arrived he attended Princeton University, intending to study physics, but soon returned to his love of computers and graduated summa cum laude, with two Bachelor of Science degrees in electrical engineering and computer science. He also served as the President of the Princeton chapter of the Students for the Exploration and Development of Space.

As a young adult post-college, Bezos worked on Wall Street in the computer science field. According to Bezos, he came up with Amazon on a cross country trip from New York to Seattle in 1994. He had left his “well-paying job” at a New York City hedge fund after learning “about the rapid growth in Internet use”, which coincided with a then-new U.S. Supreme Court ruling holding that mail order catalogs were not required to collect sales taxes in states where they lack a physical presence.” Thus Amazon.com was born and has its’ headquarters in Seattle, Washington.

Some recent cool news: Amazon.com, Inc. (AMZN) today announced that Prime Now customers in Portland can now enjoy free delivery from local restaurants and food carts. Not only can you stream endless music and movies, buy your favorite socks, receive one-day delivery, have access to early lightning-deals all year long, store unlimited photos to Amazon Cloud Drive…but you can now look to them to take over the food delivery space as well. Portland is just the first stop. Can you imagine places like the Chimes or George’s delivering hot poboys to Prime customers?!

AMZN currently trades around $570, up from $300 earlier this year. That’s nearly over a 80% increase in stock price which is amazing due to the fact that the rest of the Specialty Retail sector has been pretty negative this year.

 

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/restaurant-delivery-prime-now-comes-130000278.html

http://performance.morningstar.com/stock/performance-return.action?t=AMZN®ion=USA&culture=en_US

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Bezos