How much a stock's price changes over time is important for most investors, since price performance can both impact your investment portfolio and help you compare investment results across sectors and industries.
Another factor that can influence investors is FOMO, or the fear of missing out, especially with 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
Putting together a successful investment portfolio takes a combination of research, patience, and a little bit of risk. For Amazon, if you bought shares a decade ago, you're likely feeling really good about your investment today.
A $1000 investment made in January 2016 would be worth $7,616.41, or a gain of 661.64%, as of January 7, 2026, according to our calculations. This return excludes dividends but includes price appreciation.
Compare this to the S&P 500's rally of 248.94% and gold's return of 289.24% over the same time frame.
Analysts are forecasting more upside for AMZN too.
Amazon's international expansion and diversification across e-commerce, AWS cloud services, advertising, and streaming create multiple revenue streams while reducing concentration risk. Management's Q4 2025 guidance projects net sales of $206-$213 billion with operating income between $21-$26 billion, reflecting operational efficiency gains. AI integration across operations enhances personalization, logistics, and AWS offerings, strengthening competitive positioning. We expect 2025 net sales to grow 10.6% from 2024. However, substantial capital expenditure requirements for AI infrastructure and data centers strain financial resources and compress margins. The company's expanding debt burden reduces financial flexibility amid rising interest rates. Intensifying competition from Walmart, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud is an overhang.
Over the past four weeks, shares have rallied 5.71%, and there have been 2 higher earnings estimate revisions in the past two months for fiscal 2025 compared to none lower. 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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