For most investors, how much a stock's price changes over time is important. Not only can it impact your investment portfolio, but it can also help you compare investment results across sectors and industries.
Another thing that can drive investing is the fear of missing out, or FOMO. This particularly applies to tech giants and popular consumer-facing stocks.
What if you'd invested in Amazon (AMZN) ten years ago? It may not have been easy to hold on to AMZN for all that time, but if you did, how much would your investment be worth today?
Amazon's Business In-Depth
With that in mind, let's take a look at Amazon's main business drivers.
Amazon.com is one of the largest e-commerce providers, with sprawling operations in North America, now spreading across the globe.
Its online retail business revolves around the Prime program well-supported by the company’s massive distribution network. Further, the Whole Foods Market acquisition helped Amazon establish footprint in physical grocery supermarket space.
Amazon also enjoys dominant position in the cloud-computing market, particularly in the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) space, thanks to Amazon Web Services (AWS), which is one of its high-margin generating businesses.
Amazon has also become a household name with its Alexa powered Echo devices. Artificial Intelligence (AI) backed Alexa is helping the company sell products and services.
Revenues were $638 billion in 2024. The company reports revenue under three broad heads—North America, International and AWS. North America segment sales increased 10% year-over-year to $387.5 billion. International segment sales increased 9% year-over-year to $142.9 billion. AWS segment sales increased 19% year-over-year to $107.6 billion.
Headquartered in Seattle, WA, Amazon targets three categories of customers—consumers, sellers and website developers. Consumers are offered variety, convenience and free delivery of goods displayed on the company’s websites.
The agreements with sellers are varied, enabling them to use the company’s websites to either sell their merchandise directly, or redirect customers to the sellers’ own branded websites. In case of the latter arrangement, Amazon earns a fee for the sales thus generated.
Competition comes in the form of traditional retailers, other online retailers, media companies, web portals, search engines, e-commerce companies and cloud computing service providers.
Bottom Line
While anyone can invest, building a lucrative investment portfolio takes research, patience, and a little bit of risk. If you had invested in Amazon ten years ago, you're probably feeling pretty good about your investment today.
A $1000 investment made in September 2015 would be worth $8,841.36, or a 784.14% gain, as of September 1, 2025, according to our calculations. Investors should note that this return excludes dividends but includes price increases.
Compare this to the S&P 500's rally of 224.82% and gold's return of 191.27% over the same time frame.
Looking ahead, analysts are expecting more upside for AMZN.
Amazon reported strong second-quarter results with revenues and earnings beating estimates. Top-line gained from solid growth across North America, International, and AWS segments. Strengthening AWS services portfolio and its growing adoption rate contributed well to AWS performance which grew 17.5% to $30.8 billion. Ultrafast delivery services and expanding content portfolio were beneficial. Strengthening relationship with third-party sellers was a positive. Robust advertising business contributed well. Prime services showed robust momentum with 12% growth. However, the stock fell 7% after-hours due to weaker Q3 operating income guidance of $15.5-20.5 billion and concerns about margin pressure from heavy AI investments totaling $100+ billion in capital expenditure plans. Shares have underperformed the industry year-to-date.
The stock is up 6.64% over the past four weeks, and no earnings estimate has gone lower in the past two months, compared to 16 higher, for fiscal 2025. The consensus estimate has moved up as well.
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Amazon.com, Inc. (AMZN): Free Stock Analysis ReportThis article originally published on Zacks Investment Research (zacks.com).
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