E-Commerce Growth Has Slowed. How Amazon.com Can Still Capitalize.
Table of Contents Amazon.com stock has dropped more than 30% this year.Newsletter Sign-up Review &…
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Amazon.com stock has dropped more than 30% this year.
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Shoppers returned to stores in the past year as pandemic restrictions faded, but
Amazon.com
continued to grow its lead over e-commerce competitors.
Those were some of the takeaways from this year’s “Retail vs. AMZN” report from J.P. Morgan’s retail and technology analysts. This year’s report looked into how the postpandemic shopping landscape is shaping up.
Shares of
Amazon
(ticker: AMZN) continued their recent slide following Friday’s higher-than-expected inflation reading, closing 5.6% lower.
Amazon
stock has lagged behind the broader market with a 34% decline in 2022, compared with a roughly 18% drop for the
S&P 500
.
Its weaker-than-expected second-quarter outlook spooked Wall Street.
The J.P. Morgan team wrote Friday that U.S. e-commerce sales made up 13.2% of U.S. retail sales in 2021, down from 13.6% in 2020. They note that e-commerce sales grew 15% in 2021, compared growth north of 20% in 2020 amid lockdowns.
“Indeed, the argument that COVID introduced a whole new batch of consumers to the world of online shopping, with forced adoption of online shopping for categories such as groceries and apparel during lockdown, has simply not held up as consumers are able to go back to stores,” they write. “We expect online share to expand” by less than 1 percentage point annually.
They expect online sales growth still to outpace overall core retail sales growth, but at a slower pace than before the pandemic.
The analysts note that Amazon’s share of U.S. e-commerce sales grew to 40% in 2021, and they believe it is the fastest-growing scaled U.S. retailer.
“Amazon has benefited from the shift toward a more digitized economy, whichwas pulled forward during the pandemic,” they write.
They believe Amazon’s gross merchandise volume will hit $428 billion in 2022, up 6% year over year, excluding Whole Foods.
“We continue to believe that Amazon’s largest growth opportunities are inConsumer Packaged Goods (including Grocery), Apparel & Accessories, andFurniture/Appliances/Equipment,” they write.
Those three categories represent about 64% of U.S. adjusted retail sales, and current online penetration for those categories is roughly 13%. That gap, they say, is Amazon’s growth opportunity.
Write to Connor Smith at [email protected]
https://www.barrons.com/articles/e-commerce-amazon-stock-51654893098
