In 2013, Alibaba made more than 10x as much money as Amazon. While Alibaba’s profits have grown consistently in the past few years, Amazon’s have languished. Amazon even lost money in 2012.
Why such a massive difference?
Unlike Alibaba, Amazon actually stocks their own products. And building out warehouses in their attempt to take over the eCommerce world is no small (or affordable) feat.
To help normalize this a bit, let’s look to a different metric: free cash flow. Without getting too technical, free cash flow tells you how much cash a company is generating and removes the noise introduced by accounting techniques and other one-time events. In short, it can offer a clearer picture of a business’ health.
Normally, the costs involved with building new warehouses (called capital expenditures) would be taken out of free cash flow. But to normalize our comparison given Amazon’s wild building spree, I’ve added these warehouse expansion costs back in.