If you are considering putting $1,000 to work in a single stock, I would be looking for more than a short-term trade. Instead, I would be trying to find a business that can provide compound returns over many years. That's how Warren Buffett became one of the world's top investors by finding great compounding companies and holding them for the long term.
One great company in this category right now is Amazon (AMZN -1.26%). While best known for its dominance in online retail, Amazon has multiple growth drivers.
Image source: The Motley Fool.
A market leader with multiple growth drivers
Amazon's largest business by revenue is e-commerce, while its biggest business by profitability is cloud computing. The company is the market-share leader in both, but it is what management is doing behind the scenes with these businesses that should excite investors. Within e-commerce, it is becoming one of the world's largest digital marketing companies. This is a fast-growing, high-margin business, and the company's platform is ideal for this to be a long-term growth driver.
At the same time, Amazon's advancements in robotics, AI, and automation are a very underappreciated aspect of its story. Because these innovations don't show up on the revenue line, they often get overlooked, but these are all driving big profitability increases.
The biggest area of revenue increase is cloud computing with Amazon Web Services (AWS). The revenue gains are starting to accelerate, and the company is investing heavily to support robust demand. However, the company's biggest opportunity could be in improving its tech stack. It has dabbled in both its own AI chips and models, but it has acknowledged the big advantage that owning its own chips to train proprietary AI models could bring.
Amazon has the most established custom AI chips after Alphabet's tensor processing units, so it's not a stretch for the company to invest more heavily in this area to close the gap and gain an advantage similar to what Alphabet now holds in the AI space.
Investors also get a wild card in Leo, its satellite internet venture that competes with SpaceX's Starlink. This is still very early, but another potential source of growth with a large addressable market. It's also something that it could bundle with its Prime membership.
NASDAQ: AMZN
Key Data Points
Amazon is a great long-term buy
No stock is without risk, and Amazon is no exception. Its retail segment can be impacted by the strength of the consumer, and it has a history of investing big, which can at times weigh on near-term profits. However, these investments ultimately expand its moat and drive long-term gains.
As the leader in e-commerce and cloud computing, with a strong track record of turning heavy investment spending into durable profit streams, Amazon is a great stock for the long haul. Investors can pick it up on the cheap, with the shares trading at a historically attractive valuation.
