The new winning machine from Amazon – WORLD

Stand: 06:46 | Reading time: 4 minutes

N After Facebook narrowly missed quarterly analysts' figures Wednesday and lost more than 20% had to put figures on Thursday on Amazon. The mail order company also slightly missed expectations of revenue growth: the company achieved a $ 52.9 billion business turnover in the second quarter. Analysts were expecting $ 53.4 billion

. But this time investors reacted differently: Amazon's stock price soared 4% and Seattle's Internet retailer reached 1630 euros a share, a new historical record. With a market value of 765 billion euros, Amazon is currently only overtaken by Apple. Microsoft and the parent company of Google, Alphabet, already leave Amazon behind them

Investors react enthusiastically, Amazon posting a quarterly profit surprisingly higher than expected: $ 2.5 billion from the Seattle group between early April and late June, twelve times more than in the same quarter last year. For the 13th consecutive year, the boss and founder Jeff Bezos can make profits on the stock market.

Amazon owes its quarterly high profit to a division that was once a mess of the server's internal administration: Amazon Web Services (AWS), the cloud business has helped increase sales of 49% of a year on the other, bringing the group's business figure to more than $ 6.1 billion per quarter, of which nearly 27% are profits. Since the beginning of the year 2006, Amazon has developed a very profitable second pillar with AWS, which has a lot more room than online retailing or trading with digital media.

Only one other division of the group is growing even faster Like AWS: Under the simple keyword balance sheet "other income" Amazon conceals its growing business with online advertising on its own websites. More than 130% of the advertising business turnover compared with the previous year – 2.2 billion US dollars, the group takes as well.

The two additional divisions would not exist without the core business – advertising only works because the trading platform is so powerful. AWS also exists only because the group has already acquired its expertise in running its own data centers and has rented early in 2006 a surplus server capacity. But currently, both divisions are so successful that Bezos can reinvest the profits of its additional business in the further development of the core business. "I think it's almost impossible to judge Amazon by segment," comments online retailer Gerrit Heinemann of the Niederrhein University of Applied Sciences. "Basically, Amazon is a data society whose divisions are mutually dependent."

In the international online trade Amazon has – unlike the US domestic market – never reported a profit. During the last quarter, the Group recorded a negative margin of -3.4%, compared to -6.3% a year ago. Growth is even more important for Amazon in international business than profit, so the international trade industry is allowed to be in the red. Heinemann is convinced: if Jeff Bezos wanted to make profits in the trade, he would only have to change a few chips. "But Bezos has internalized: growth is only possible with massive investments.The profit must be behind him."

With the money of the once insignificant test balls, Amazon can cement its international dominance in the core business of e-commerce in the medium term. The group earns money with divisions that only account for part of the competition costs in the income statement. It leases space on servers and in its department stores, sells shipping and handling services to its competitors in the online business, supports a portion of the advertising budget. Even the big online competitors such as the German online clothing retailer Zalando now rely on the AWS server services.

Behind the red numbers in international online trading is another tip from Jeff Bezos, Heinemann's Amazon Prime offering leverages Bezos as an innovative form of mixed costs. "The group took $ 3.43 billion in the last quarter thanks to Prime's customers: they get video streaming and music, but pay $ 120 a year for their market." Thanks to this revenue, Amazon can reduce prices and shipping costs for key customers. These customers then like to forget when they make a decision to purchase that they have already advanced annual fees. "The business turnover of the AWS data center business and advertising allows Bezo to invest in the future, what no other group in the world can do allow: more than 7% of its sales have been invested.the 2017 group in research and development, so that Amazon has, according to a study by the accounting firm PwC, the largest research budget in the world.