07-29-2017, 01:29 PM
Stock pickers tend to screen companies for metrics including price-to-earnings ratios, analysts’ earnings estimates and profit margins. But there’s a simpler approach in this long period of technological transformation that is threatening industries from retail to banking: customer satisfaction. See: Every time this happens, Amazon crushes another legacy retailer The American Customer Satisfaction Core Alpha ETF ACSI, comprises about 170 mostly large-cap stocks that are selected according to American Customer Satisfaction Index scores. Stocks are allocated so that each sector is weighted within 10%, up or down, of that sector’s market-capitalization weighting in the benchmark S&P 500 Index SPX.
Amazon has started a secret skunkworks lab dedicated to opportunities in health care, including new areas such as electronic medical records and telemedicine. Amazon has dubbed this stealth team 1492, which appears to be a reference to the year Columbus first landed in the Americas. The stealth team, which is headquartered in Seattle, is focused on both hardware and software projects, according to two people familiar. Amazon has become increasingly interested in exploring new business in healthcare. For example, Amazon has another unit exploring selling pharmaceuticals, CNBC reported in May.
Amazon 1492: secret health tech project
Before it was Amazon killing the retailers. Last week it was Amazon disrupting appliances. Now there's a broader concern: Amazon has the potential to disrupt the middleman in general, particularly those that work in the $7 trillion business-to-business (B2B) space.
Here's the issue: If you don't make the object you are selling, or don't have some sort of intellectual property, or solve a pain point for a customer, then you're just a middleman, and you are increasingly more vulnerable. The concern is that these middlemen will start losing volume because sales in general are going to the internet and because it's increasingly difficult to get pricing.
Amazon juggernaut sets its sights on its next victim: The middleman
But in 2015, Jeff Bezos' Seattle-headquartered tech giant decided it needed to do a better job of tapping into the online business-to-business (B2B) market, worth £96.5 billion ($125.4 billion) in the UK alone, according to the Office for National Statistics. It launched a new free-to-use business-supplies marketplace called Amazon Business in the US, expanding to Germany in December 2016 and the UK in April. Amazon Business is off to a promising start, according to Bill Burkland, the head of Amazon Business in the UK. "The US acquired over 400,000 businesses and a billion dollars in revenue for Amazon Business in its first year of business," he said during an interview at the company's London office, adding that there were 45,000 sellers on Amazon Business in the US by the end of the first year.
Amazon chases multibillion-dollar B2B business with Amazon Business - Business Insider