5 Near Monopoly Stocks in the US

2. Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN)

Number of Hedge Fund Holders: 269

Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) is a Seattle, Washington-based technology company founded by Jeff Bezos in 1994. The company has become a mainstay in the lives of Americans through its e-commerce offerings.

Amazon.com, Inc.’s (NASDAQ:AMZN) marketplace provides more reach to merchants as compared to other platforms, as it has a nearly 60% market share in the US e-commerce industry, according to PYMNTS. The lockdowns and restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic saw a strong shift from in-store purchases to e-commerce buying. In a research note issued to investors on December 13, Brian Fitzgerald at Wells Fargo highlighted that the gross merchandise value (GMV) for Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) has started to re-accelerate. The company holds a near monopoly position in the cloud computing segment through its Amazon Web Services (AWS) offering.

Here’s what Farnam Street Investments said about Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) in its Q3 2022 investor letter:

“Change doesn’t just impact investors. Business people also bet for or against change. Jeff Bezos was once asked this exact question:

“You can build a business strategy around the things that are stable in time. It’s impossible to imagine a future ten years from now where a customer comes up and says, ‘Jeff, I love Amazon, I just wish the prices were a little higher.’ Or, ‘I love Amazon, I just wish you’d deliver a little slower.’ Impossible. So we know the energy we put into these things today will still be paying off dividends ten years from now. When you have something you know is true, you can afford to put a lot of energy into it.”

A lot of energy… and more than $172 billion in capital expenditure in the last fifteen years.

Deeper, slower moving layers turn exponential growth into “S-curves.” A rapidly dividing bacteria crashes into the resource-wall of its Petri dish. Nineteenth-century commercial robber barons were smacked by the governance layer of the Sherman Antitrust act. Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) Prime free shipping leaned on the creaking infrastructure of the U.S. Postal Service until it was forced to invest in its own infrastructure (all those delivery vans you see driving around).

Hopefully, next time you’re thinking about change, you can recall pace layers as a helpful construct to understand how successful systems change.