Analysts give Amazon.com Inc. (Nasdaq: AMZN) a lot of credit these days.
The company can single-handedly alter a business environment overnight … or at least that’s what analysts would lead you to believe.
Amazon’s latest market-moving announcement was that it was close to deciding on entering the online pharmaceutical drug marketplace.
Let me repeat that.
Amazon is “close to deciding.” It hasn’t even decided yet.
But that didn’t stop stocks like CVS Health Corp. (NYSE: CVS) from dropping over 7% in the days following the news. It’s as if analysts think whatever Amazon touches is automatically changed forever.
That’s simply not the case.
The reality is that Amazon is not afraid to fail. That’s what has made the company the giant it is today.
But it’s also given Amazon a long track record of failures when it comes to entering a new market.
As I’ll show you in a second, there are many failures as examples.
But it’s this history of failure for the company that causes me to see these attempts to enter new markets as an opportunity to buy the same stocks that were sold off on the announcement, despite what analysts say.
Let me explain…
Epic Fail
I’ll start with a list of Amazon’s failures over the years since these don’t seem to come up often when an analyst is praising the company.
The Fire Phone is probably the biggest.
Expected to compete with the iPhone and Samsung phones, and met with much praise right out of the gate from Amazon users, it ended up being a big flop. At one point, Amazon couldn’t even give the phone away for $0.99. Amazon wrote off $170 million for its failed attempt into the smartphone market.
It launched Destinations in 2015 to be a marketplace for hotel deals. This failed in just six months.
Amazon Local was launched in 2011 to take on Groupon and LivingSocial. That was deemed a failure in 2015.
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