Amazon’s Self-Interest Opens Up Its Books a Crack
Recent disclosures suggest that Amazon isn’t as big as people had thought and that it’s more of a middleman than a conventional retailer.
Amazon offers a sly rebuttal to growing criticism that it's the big bully of online shopping.
Photographer: Krisztian Bocsi/BloombergI’ve chided Amazon.com Inc. for its useless financial “disclosures,” particularly around its annual Prime Day hoopla. But in Amazon’s April letter to shareholders, the company for the first time gave crucial information that allowed outsiders to work out the value of merchandise sold on the company’s digital mall and the chunk from businesses that use Amazon as a sales conduit.
My first takeaway from these disclosures was that Amazon’s growth was slowing considerably. But those figures contained two other messages, one explicit and one implicit: that Amazon isn’t as big as people had thought and that it’s more of a middleman than a conventional retailer.