Is amazon retail not very profitable?
I don't know if Amazon breaks out downloads such as Kindle or movies from the non-AWS part of income statement. You might look at the annual filing to see if there is a breakdown. You are interested in &quot;retail&quot;. If we take &quot;retail&quot; to mean non-AWS then we can use the table I posted. It looks like in 9 recent months retail made 5.7B USD in North America and AWS made 9.9B USD. This is only an operating profit so expect actual profit to be less. If they had overestimated depreciation rates and surged retail investment then it might be that reducing retail investment will increase the retail profit margin. The retail operating margin looks like 3.5% in North America and 0.5% international. At Walmart it was 4.0%. So Amazon is delivering and they make a similar amount on a margin basis in at least in North America albeit the nature of the goods is different. The international segment is the laggard at Amazon.

For comparison is this Walmart statement that follows. Note that at Amazon the recent data column is to the right of the &quot;year ago&quot; column and at Walmart the order of the columns is the opposite...