Shares of Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN), the world’s largest online retailer and cloud services provider, rose in the third quarter after reporting strong revenue growth (28% year-over-year) and improving margins in its core e-commerce business. Amazon’s other major business segment, Amazon Web Services (AWS), the disruptive cloud computing offering, continues to gain traction with enterprise customers, and had another strong quarter of growth (58% year-over-year in currency-neutral dollars). Given our belief that the shift in enterprise IT spending has passed the tipping point towards cloud computing, we expect AWS to be an even larger contributor to value creation than Amazon’s core e-commerce segment. (Ashim Mehra)
From Baron Opportunity Fund third-quarter 2016 commentary.
