Companies aren’t talking about Amazon as much as they used to

Amazon has long been the bogeyman in the boardroom.

For years it seemed all companies could talk about in their annual 10-K filings, which includes a section called Risk Factors where companies lists the most significant threats to their business, was Amazon and its Web Services division. The number of documents citing Amazon or AWS as a risk factor just kept going up.

But recently, that’s changed. In the last two years, such mentions of Amazon have started to come down, according to data from market intelligence platform AlphaSense.

Mentions on earnings transcripts and within filings overall have declined too, according to data from FactSet.

For example, travel site Booking.com, mentioned Amazon as a risk last year but didn’t this year. Last year it wrote, “Some of our current and potential competitors, such as Google, Apple, Alibaba, Tencent, Amazon, Uber, and Meta, have significantly more customers or users, consumer data, and financial and other resources than we do,” while this year it just said those competitors “include the largest global technology companies.”

It’s unlikely that Amazon, which ranks among the most valuable companies in the world by market cap, has become less of a risk. So why the relative silence?

There could be a few reasons. There are fewer public companies these days and Big Tech companies like Amazon have been buying up would-be public companies, but that’s a long-running trend that Amazon had bucked. It could also be that companies have become more cagey when it comes to mentioning their tech stacks. It’s also possible that Amazon is just not news anymore. Companies have already adopted the cloud and Amazon might be so omnipresent it no longer warrants mention (though if it’s still a risk companies should probably say so in their 10-Ks). Notably, obvious competitors like Walmart and Google never mention Amazon as a risk.

Still, it bears mention that a huge number of companies still mention Amazon among their risk factors, either due to competition from or relationships with the online retail and internet behemoth, including UPS, Roku, Netflix, Pinterest, Mattel, Sonos, American Express, and Uber.

Interestingly, Amazon — which itself has threatened to disrupt Walmart, retail in general, package delivery, bookstores, grocery stores, healthcare, you name it — has lately been finding itself in more of a defensive position than it’s used to, as it focusses on fending off other e-commerce upstarts like Temu and Shein.

“Competition continues to intensify, including with the development of new business models and the entry of new and well-funded competitors,” its latest 10-K reads, as it has for years, without mentioning any companies by name.

And maybe there is more competition that other companies are worried about. Of course, Amazon also has a vested interested in appearing to have competition, since these days antitrust regulators are what it’s most afraid of.

Amazon, whose stock risen lately thanks to the company’s AI efforts, reports earnings after market close today. Let us know if you have other theories as to why Amazon is seeming like less of a risk.