Amazon’s $1b in daily sales highlights market dominance

Bloomberg

Amazon.com Inc breached the $1 billion-a-day revenue mark in 2020, in another example of how the company’s massive growth and market dominance has made its stock a near-unanimous favorite on Wall Street.
The e-commerce giant’s fourth-quarter results brought full-year revenue to $386 billion. According to an analysis of Bloomberg data, Walmart Inc is the only other US company with a $1 billion daily sales average, though Exxon Mobil has hit it in the past.
Amazon’s massive haul reflects both the holiday shopping season and the pandemic, which accelerated a longstanding shift to online retail over last year. As a measure of how the company is thriving in this environment, revenue grew nearly 44% in the fourth quarter, topping $100 billion for
the first time; it also guided towards another quarter above that level.
The stock dipped 0.3% to trade around $3,370, with the results offset by the news that Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos will be stepping down from his post later this year. Amazon’s shares have gained nearly 70% over the past 12 months.
While Walmart has consistently reported revenue above the $100 billion threshold for years, it is only expected to report revenue growth of about 4.5% when it reports later this month, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
“The growth Amazon is seeing is just amazing, and it reflects a structural shift toward e-commerce that isn’t stopping or slowing,” said David Wagner, a portfolio manager at Aptus Capital Advisors, which owns the stock. In a phone interview, he added that “as this tailwind continues, Amazon will become even more of a behemoth than it already is, and not just in e-commerce, but retail overall.”
Among S&P 500 companies with at least $50 billion in annual revenue, only T-Mobile USA Inc and Centene Corp had growth above 40% in their most recent quarters, and both were boosted by recent acquisitions.
In addition, Amazon is one of only six S&P 500 companies to report at least six consecutive quarters with revenue growth above 20%, along with Netflix, Etsy, Salesforce.com, ServiceNow Inc and DexCom Inc.