Bloomberg reports that "Amazon.com Inc. is the world’s first public company to lose a trillion dollars in market value as a combination of rising inflation, tightening monetary policies and disappointing earnings updates triggered a historic selloff in the stock this year.
"Shares in the e-commerce and cloud company fell 4.3% on Wednesday, pushing its market value to about $879 billion from a record close at $1.88 trillion on July 2021. Amazon and Microsoft Corp. were neck-and-neck in the race to breach the unwelcome milestone, with the Windows software maker close behind after having lost $889 billion from a November 2021 peak."
The story goes on:
"The world’s largest online retailer has spent this year adjusting to a sharp slowdown in e-commerce growth as shoppers resumed pre-pandemic habits. Its shares have fallen almost 50% amid slowing sales, soaring costs and a jump in interest rates. Since the start of the year, co-founder Jeff Bezos has seen his fortune dwindle by about $83 billion to $109 billion, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
"Last month, Amazon projected the slowest revenue growth for a holiday quarter in the company’s history as shoppers reduce their spending in the face of economic uncertainty. That sent its market value below $1 trillion for the first time since the pandemic-fueled rally in tech stocks more than two years ago."
- KC's View:
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What do you think? Should we start organizing a GoFundMe page for Jeff Bezos?
In all seriousness … Amazon may be facing nine miles of bad road, but I have a lot of confidence in the soundness of the core businesses and the ability of the company to rebound even as it looks for places in which it can jump-start growth.
One of those places is grocery … and I continue to believe that food will be one of the tools that Amazon will employ to pave over the roughest part of the road. I would look for Amazon to continue investing in the reinvention the food shopping experience. I also continue to believe that Amazon isn't that far away from a transformative move in food - one great executive with passion and vision, and the ability to fuse the company's virtual and physical businesses in a way that makes sense to shoppers, would make all the difference.
