创业与商业eugenewei.com
亚马逊与“无利润商业模式”谬误
Amazon and the "profitless business model" fallacy
2013 — 2025，它一次次回到首页
黑点是上首页（≥ 50 分）的那次投稿，空心点是没冲上去的投稿，点越大分数越高。
导读
这篇文章剖析了外界对亚马逊“无利润商业模式”的批评，指出亚马逊并非不赚钱，而是有意把利润再投入于仓储物流和低价策略，追求长期增长而非短期盈利。作者梳理了贝索斯“长期主义”的经营逻辑，解释了为何这种模式在财务报表上长期显得利润微薄。
为什么经久不衰：它精准解释了亚马逊“低利润但持续扩张”背后的战略逻辑，多年后回看，AWS 等业务的崛起验证了这一判断，是理解亚马逊乃至长期主义商业模式的经典文本。
HN 评论精选
从会计角度指出文章论证的漏洞：资本化机制使得“建履约中心导致无利润”的说法不完全成立
这个解释有些问题。会计规则中其实有很好的机制来处理对未来的投资，叫做资本化。如果公司花钱建造或购置新资产，这算资本支出，不会从利润中扣除。比如公司有一百万利润，花一百万建新的履约中心，仍可报告一百万利润。所以不能简单说亚马逊建履约中心吃掉了利润。不过事情也不那么简单：有些面向未来的投资因收益太不确定、难以量化，SEC 要求作为普通费用列支，这类支出多涉及研发和增长相关的行政开支。因此许多追求增长的公司确实会报告较低的利润。
hristov查看英文原文
There are some issues with this explanation. The main issue is that the rules of accounting have a very good provision to take into account investing into the future. It is called capitalization. Thus, if a company spends money to build or acquire a new asset, it is called capital spending and it is not subtracted from the profits. Thus, for example, if a company had a million dollars of profit and decided to spend these million dollars on a new fulfillment center, they could spend the money for their fulfillment center and still report a million dollars in profit. So it is not quite clear-cut to say that Amazon's desire to build fulfillment centers around the world is costing them their profits. Those things should be capitalized and once they are capitalized they should not affect the profits. Amazon did in fact report significant capital spending (as one can see on their cash flow statement). However, things are not that simple. Sometimes some expenses which are about building for the future and investing into new growth are not capitalized. This is the case because for some expenses the benefits are so uncertain and difficult to quantify that the SEC requires that they are reported as ordinary expenses instead of capital spending. These types of expenses tend to involve R&D and may include certain administrative expenses associated with growth initiatives. Therefore, many companies that are trying to grow do report lower profits because they have those expenses that are associated with investment into future growth but are not capitalized. This may be the case for amazon. But it is a question to what extent it is the case for amazon. For example, they do capitalize software and website development for new products and websites. So one cannot simply say that they are showing losses because they are spending all the money on making great new products. But then again, they expense software development for existing products. So perhaps the losses are associated with new growth features that are built into existing software. So all in all it is a big muddle and it is not at all clear whether amazon is an inherently highly profitable company that happens to be investing in the future, or they are wasting money, or their business model is just not that profitable.
用 EC2 定价的轶事佐证贝索斯主动选择低利润以阻止竞争的长期策略
如果你不熟悉贝索斯的“长期”思维，Brad Stone 书中这段轶事很有意思：贝索斯希望 AWS 像公用事业一样低价，哪怕短期亏钱。EC2 团队成员 van Biljon 提出每小时 15 美分的定价，他认为这能让服务盈亏平衡。在 EC2 发布前的 S Team 会议上，贝索斯单方面改成 10 美分。“你知道这样可能亏很久，”van Biljon 说。“太好了，”贝索斯回答。贝索斯相信亚马逊的成本结构使其能在低利润的稀薄空气中生存，而 IBM、微软、谷歌等会因拉低整体利润率而不愿进入这类市场。他还说不想重蹈乔布斯的错误——把 iPhone 定价得利润过高，反而招来了整个智能手机市场的竞争。
minouye查看英文原文
If you're not familiar with the "long-term" thinking of Bezos, this anecdote from Brad Stone's recent book on Amazon is particularly interesting: Bezos wanted AWS to be a utility with discount rates, even if that meant losing money in the short term. Willem van Biljon, who worked with Chris Pinkham on EC2 and stayed for a few months after Pinkham quit in 2006, proposed pricing EC2 instances at fifteen cents an hour, a rate that he believed would allow the company to break even on the service. In an S Team meeting before EC2 launched, Bezos unilaterally revised that to ten cents. “You realize you could lose money on that for a long time,” van Biljon told him. “Great,” Bezos said. Bezos believed his company had a natural advantage in its cost structure and ability to survive in the thin atmosphere of low-margin businesses. Companies like IBM, Microsoft, and Google, he suspected, would hesitate to get into such markets because it would depress their overall profit margins. Bill Miller, the chief investment officer at Legg Mason Capital Management and a major Amazon shareholder, asked Bezos at the time about the profitability prospects for AWS. Bezos predicted they would be good over the long term but said that he didn’t want to repeat “Steve Jobs’s mistake” of pricing the iPhone in a way that was so fantastically profitable that the smartphone market became a magnet for competition.
前员工视角：亚马逊内部无人认为公司战略有误，侧面印证其模式的强大
在我读过的关于这个话题的文章中，这篇最准确地概括了公司上半层人士的观点。没有人害怕，没有人感到防御，没有人认为公司整体走错了路（尽管确实有少数业务被认为不对）。我的职场经历不算广，但就我所及，我遇到过很多人觉得自己跳槽到竞争对手那里十年内能打赢老东家，却从没遇到一个亚马逊员工觉得自己能打败亚马逊——哪怕对手有沃尔玛的钱袋。这很能说明其商业策略。
saosebastiao查看英文原文
Out of all the articles I have read on the issue, this one most accurately sums up the views and opinions of the upper half of the organization. Nobody is scared. Nobody is feeling defensive. Nobody thinks the business as a whole is on the wrong path (although there are definitely a few ventures that some feel are in the wrong). I don't have the most broad corporate employment history, but as far as it extends, I've met tons of people who feel like they could join a competitor to their own employer and win against them within a decade or so. I have never met a single person who worked at Amazon that has felt that way about competing against Amazon. Even if that competitor had the pocketbooks of Wal-Mart. To me, that speaks volumes about a business strategy.
以 FBA 为例说明亚马逊正把零售履约环节全部纳入自身体系
“我在亚马逊卖二手书，平台抽成，而打包发货的是我自己。”在亚马逊“让消费者触达一切零售”的路线下，较新的 FBA（亚马逊物流）服务大幅简化了个人转售，免去了打包发货的环节。这项服务很惊人，已经接近“把一箱东西寄给我们就行”。我打赌五年内就能实现，虽然有不少问题（比如什么有价值什么没有），但他们已经在用只收现代条码商品、对滞销库存收仓储费等方式解决这些问题。
aresant查看英文原文
" I sell a used book on Amazon, it takes a cut of the transaction, I am the one packing and shipping that item to the buyer. " In true Amazon "dominate all retail by making it accessible to consumers" their relatively new "Fulfillment By Amazon" service drastically simplifies consumer reselling by eliminating the need for the consumer to do the "packing and shipping". It's an amazing service, and they are getting darn close to the "just ship us a box of your stuff" I bet that we see that inside of the next five years, there are lots of problems (like what is / is not valuable) but you can see them already working around these issues by only accepting items with modern barcodes, charge small warehousing fees if something sits too long in inventory, etc. (1)http://services.amazon.com/fulfillment-by-amazon/benefits.htm
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