Originally posted on 12/01/2017:

Quote Originally Posted by MinnesotaFats View Post
....only on paper, Amazon still not a profitable company very consistently.

I think they ran in the red for about 15 years.
When your company is growing you don't want money to count as a profit. You want to be borrowing money to grow the business.

I used to work for a growing company. We were in the red for years. When the quarterly numbers came out we would always joke that we were losing more money than ever and it was a good thing. Of course the company wasn't losing money. They were taking all the profit and re-investing it.