A Price Amazon Is Content to Keep High: $1,000 a Share -<br />By NICK WINGFIELDMAY 30, 2017<br />Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder and chief executive, has been dismissive of the preoccupation with near-term stock price swings, often quoting<br />the influential investor Benjamin Graham, who said the market is a voting machine in the short run and a weighing machine in the long run.<br />Even with all of Amazon’s staggering growth — $136 billion in revenue last year, compared with $148 million in 1997 — e-commerce<br />still represents only around 10 percent of total retail spending in the United States, the company’s most mature market.<br />“For any stock analyst trying to find growth and return on investment in the retail sector today, they’re clearly putting money into Amazon<br />because that’s where they anticipate the growth coming from,” said Cooper Smith, an analyst at L2, a retail research firm.<br />Crossing the $1,000 mark, said Christian Magoon, chief executive of Amplify ETFs, which includes a fund<br />that holds Amazon shares, “speaks to the triumph of e-commerce and the vision of Jeff Bezos.”<br />The investor optimism about Amazon is, in many respects, unchanged from when it went public in 1997.<br />Amazon’s shares are up almost 33 percent for the year and up 368 percent over five years.<br />That leaves Amazon — which accounted for 43 cents of every dollar spent online in the United<br />States last year, according to Slice Intelligence — with a lot of room to grow.<br />Tech companies make up the five most valuable companies in the world by market capitalization.
