Scott Galloway, professor of Marketing at NYU Stern and the author of "The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google", explains how Amazon's "Type 2" investments are the key to its incredible success. Following is a transcript of the video.
Scott Galloway: So people ask what Amazon's core competence or advantage is, relative to the other members of the four and it comes down to storytelling. And that is Jeff Bezos' essential rap has not changed in 15 years and it's a pretty intoxicating visionary rap, where they're gonna invest massively across some consumer truisms that aren't perishable: value, convenience, selection, speed.
And the marketplace keeps bidding up the stocks. As a result, they have access to cheaper capital than any company in modern history. Amazon can now borrow money for less than the cost of what China can borrow money. As a result, they are able to throw up more stuff against the wall than any other firms. If the phone doesn't work, if it fails, if auctions don't fail, it's a speed bump for them, whereas, other companies will probably be either put out of business or see their stock cut in half.
Some Plan B investments that had worked, they launched a company based on their own infrastructure and storage needs called "AWS" that now everyday, adds the entire capacity that they needed when they launched it for themselves internally, and is the number one share leader and what is the most profitable, fastest-growing business in tech to cloud with triple the share of the number two, Microsoft. This year, Amazon will spend $4.5 billion on original television content, second only to Netflix, who increased their budget to $2 billion when they heard Amazon's footsteps behind them.
Amazon can go into non-core categories and show up and be dominant in record time because they have access to cheaper capital. Effectively, this company is playing unfair and winning.
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