Bezos could be $90 bln richer with Amazon breakup | Reuters

Bezos could be $90 bln richer with Amazon breakup | Reuters

Bezos could be $90 bln richer with Amazon breakup | Reuters

NEW YORK, Nov 19 (Reuters Breakingviews) – Jeff Bezos is sitting on an even bigger gold mine than he thinks. His nearly 10% stake in $1.9 trillion Amazon.com (AMZN.O) is worth some $190 billion. But he could become some 50% richer if the company were to split into two parts.

Earlier this year the founder of the e-commerce giant stepped down as its day-to-day leader and handed the reins to Andy Jassy, formerly the top executive of Amazon Web Services, the company’s cloud business. That division remains by far the fastest growing and most efficient, posting an operating margin of more than 22% in the last 12 months versus low single digits at Amazon’s online-retailing arm.

Given how the market is viewing data and cloud-software firms, AWS is also far more valuable. Much smaller but comparable companies like Cloudflare (NET.N) trade at enterprise value-to-estimated sales multiples of as much as 80 times. Firms like Palantir Technologies (PLTR.N) and Okta (OKTA.O), which are different but growing at a similar pace, boast valuations of around 24 times sales.