It’s easy to get distracted by Amazon’s stock price and forget that, on paper, they’re a financial train wreck. Historically, being a software provider for a high-growth sector is a great way to report 40%+ operating margins with minimal capital expenditures. Amazon… does not report stats like this. Their operating margin is about 3.4%. Because, in addition to being in the business of building software for growth industries, they’re in the business of building warehouses, buying planes and trucks, and hiring an army of pickers, packers, and sorters to operate it all.