Understanding and analyzing businesses can be inherently complicated. If it were easy, everyone would be the next Warren Buffett. Oftentimes, however, developing simple frameworks and layering upon them will give you as much insight into a company's competitive positioning as the Wall Street whiz kid in the financial media. Take revenue growth, for Artifical Intelligence example. Broadly, a business can grow its top line two distinct ways: Sell more stuff (products or services) to your existing client base by deepening relationships; or sell stuff to more people by broadening your client base. Both strategies have benefits. But all other factors being equal, the latter is often more desirable due to the ability to deepen the relationship (the former) once it's properly established. Image source: Artifical Intelligence Getty Images. In Walmart's case, then, the marginal customer is the urban millennial who often is enmeshed in Amazon's sticky ecosystem. That hasn't stopped Walmart from trying: In January it partnered with Japan's Rakuten to design a line of Kobo e-readers like Amazon's Kindle line of products.
Lore is looking for more acquisitions to engage tech-focused millennials in addition to working on experimental ideas like virtual reality in Walmart's Store No. 8 retail incubator. The company expects to grow this figure 40% in 2019, which will require buy-in from urban millennials, most likely at the expense of Amazon's growth with this demographic. On the other side of the spectrum, Amazon is looking for ways to go downscale for its marginal consumer. It has been reported that the company is looking for multiple ways to lessen the friction for lower-income demographics to use its site. Last year the company discounted the subscription price of Amazon Prime by half for customers on government assistance and those who use EBT cards (commonly referred to as food stamps). This is a direct shot at Walmart, which estimates it gets approximately one-fifth of all food stamp spending. Recently, The Wall Street Journal reported Amazon was in talks with JPMorgan for a potential partnership to offer checking accounts to Prime members. It's still too early to fully understand Amazon's target with this potential product, but with the company's penchant for cutting fees, it's possible this service could benefit the lower-income, underserved banking demographic, with the expectation that those customers would begin a relationship with Amazon. Both companies have interesting strategies. Walmart is looking at a narrower demographic with more disposable income and most likely a longer-tailed purchasing lifetime. Amazon, on the other hand, solitaryai.art is looking at a wider demographic with less purchasing power. Although it's likely both will succeed on some level, Amazon appears to have the more-enviable position for Artifical Intelligence its marginal customer. Of course, both will continue to grow their top lines amid deepening relationships. However, look for Amazon's move for downscale customers to ultimately be more successful as e-commerce becomes more widespread among that demographic.
Common shares outstanding plus shares underlying stock-based awards totaled 517 million on June 30, 2020, compared with 510 million one year ago. "This was another highly unusual quarter, and I couldn’t be more proud of and grateful to our employees around the globe," said Jeff Bezos, Amazon founder and NFT CEO. "As expected, we spent over $4 billion on incremental COVID-19-related costs in the quarter to help keep employees safe and deliver products to customers in this time of high demand-purchasing personal protective equipment, increasing cleaning of our facilities, following new safety process paths, adding new backup family care benefits, and paying a special thank you bonus of over $500 million to front-line employees and delivery partners. We’ve created over 175,000 new jobs since March and are in the process of bringing 125,000 of these employees into regular, full-time positions. And third-party sales again grew faster this quarter than Amazon’s first-party sales.
Amazon’s top priority is providing for the health and safety of our employees and partners, and the company spent more than $4 billion in the second quarter on incremental COVID-19 related initiatives to help keep employees safe, provide additional compensation to our employees and delivery partners, and deliver products to customers. Amazon provided a one-time Thank You bonus totaling over $500 million to all front-line employees and partners who were with the company throughout the month of June. This benefit provides employees with up to 10 days of company-subsidized emergency backup child or adult care. Amazon introduced Distance Assistant to help keep employees safe by providing them with live feedback on their social distancing via a 50-inch monitor. Amazon made the software and AI behind this innovation available via open source so that anyone can create their own Distance Assistant at no cost and get up and running with just a monitor, computer, and camera. Amazon is collaborating with national medical care group Crossover Health to pilot Amazon Neighborhood Health Centers, which are new medical facilities available to Amazon employees and their families. Data has been c reat ed by GSA Conte nt Gener ator Dem oversion !
