Everyone wants a liquid market.
Also, it’s not just retail. Many employees at amazon get their bonuses in allocated shares, which gets more complicated the more they are worth.
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This.
Plus I would imagine shareholders make more loyal customers. Win-win!
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Not every broker offers fractional shares, this enables people to buy Amazon who couldn’t before.
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Interesting point, Neil. It must be hard to keep developing new markets when you get to that size.
Also, you’re limited by the available markets that are worth getting into, i.e. they have to be big enough.
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The uk amazon has stopped this now unfortunately (will it has for anyone not in management)
I was working for them just vefore they stopped giving them out, as you can imagine, people werent impressed lol
Not sure about America, if they do things differently or not.
They also made you sell them after having them for two years (obviously if you still worked there)
Its only the management that are able to keep them and collect more
UK Amazon hasn’t stopped awarding employees stock grants in the UK. They were always discretionary.
They didn’t make you sell them after two years. They vested after two years.
This is very similar to many companies (except vesting periods vary).
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This buy back and split had a few potential causes.
When your market cap if as big as Amazon (apple & Microsoft can be viewed the same) They could wipe out completion in many sectors but To find a high enough margin with a large enough TAM is not easy. You want to be adding 15% gross revenue, for Amazon this would be ~$70bn
They’re current big in-house project is healthcare, after buying Pillpack a few years ago. They are trialing health services with staff before rolling it out. It’s a huge market but this would be delivered via Alexa and has probably swallowed much of the R&D it requires. This would follow their strategy of turning a cost center into a revenue stream (fulfilment & cloud servers)
A stagnate share price makes stock options less valuable and can be a hiring obstacle, It’s very competitive market so why work for Amazon when Microsoft options would be worth more?
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I remember reading at least a year ago that Amazon were looking at healthcare, something involving Warren Buffet as well.
I don’t know too much about US healthcare or other markets, but I would assume it’s ripe for disruption. Anywhere that people can get their meds delivered next day/same day and bought through an easy 1 click service or similar.
“Alexa, give me a colonoscopy and upload it to the cloud for all Amazon employees to see”
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It’s huge industry and very fragmented, they spend north of $4tr on health care in the US so Amazon could boost top line revenue by 15% in taking 2% of US healthcare spend.
This is a good piece if you fancy a fairly long read.
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When is the split meant to take place?
Edit: Never mind its June 6th
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Looks like Amazon do pay out a lot more equity comp than Microsoft, but I think big public tech companies tend to offer RSUs (stock) rather than options now so price appreciation is less important vs the amount of compensation.
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According to
Amazon was the worst performing tech stock in 2021. Activist investor Dan Loeb reckons there is $1 trillion dollars in untapped value:
Interestingly Amazon already had an agreed stock purchase plan in place:
So the present announcement is doubling that agreement. The other interesting thing that one can glean from that article is that it has not repurchased stock for 10 years prior to Jan this year.
There is no mention of health by Loeb: his $1 trillion untapped value comes from the e-commerce business and its Amazon Web Services cloud unit.
Many positive signals for 2022/23 here. I guess the main headwinds for the business will be inflationary pressures ( whatever the cause).
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That is interesting, it like glassdoor but with compensation breakdown. I know one thing for sure - I should have stuck with my early interest in computer building!
$1tr is a nice number to shout about but I like to see where he thinks that’ll come from AWS which has been a monster, still holding ~30% market share.
Health could be worth $1tr on its own and it’s why I brought Amazon but sold them as I think they’re going to be exposed to inflation and staffing pressure for most of the year. Maybe 2023 I’ll buy back in.
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No need. You can work in Tech Sales and get the same salaries without needing any STEM qualification. 
AWS is indeed a beast. Still growing >30% every year.
I’m listening … I know how to talk (and type) nonsense for a living!
I have 0.0417 shares of Amazon will I make much with the split or do I need to buy a full share? I’m a beginner so don’t know much
You shouldn’t need to have a full share, no. Following the share split, the number of shares you hold will be updated accordingly.
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“The tech-heavy Nasdaq in the US is down over 12% so far this year. That presents plenty of opportunities for me to buy shares in big US-listed tech companies such as Amazon, Alphabet, and Microsoft.”
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Read Motley Fool with caution
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