The S&P 500 took a pounding at the beginning of April, falling 11% in the space of a few days. While the benchmark US index has since bounced back by 7.6%, many stocks remain well off their recent highs.
Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) is one such example. Its share price is still 23% lower than it was near the start of February.
Here, I’ll explain why I think the stock may well be on sale for long-term investors.
Should you invest £1,000 in Amazon right now?
When investing expert Mark Rogers has a stock tip, it can pay to listen. After all, the flagship Motley Fool Share Advisor newsletter he has run for nearly a decade has provided thousands of paying members with top stock recommendations from the UK and US markets. And right now, Mark thinks there are 6 standout stocks that investors should consider buying. Want to see if Amazon made the list?
10 years of incredible growth
A decade ago, Amazon was already a juggernaut. It posted revenue of $107bn in 2015, with its Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud business nearing $10bn in annual sales.
The market cap was above $300bn, which would have made it the largest FTSE 100 firm — and still would by some distance!
Investors back then might have mistakenly assumed that the e-commerce giant’s high-growth days were coming to an end. However, fast forward to today, Amazon’s market cap is just under $2trn!
Last year, its revenue came in at $638bn, with AWS growing 19% year on year and contributing over $100bn. Incredibly, Amazon’s operating profit surged 86%, reaching $68.6bn.
Over the past 10 years, the share price has risen 885%!
The innovation goes on
The lesson here is that just because Amazon is already a juggernaut, it doesn’t mean it can’t keep growing even larger over the next five to 10 years. Indeed, digesting CEO Andy Jassy’s recent annual letter to shareholders, this looks extremely likely to me.
The company plans to invest as much as $100bn this year, much of that building out artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities. Services like SageMaker, Bedrock, and Nova already help customers build, deploy, and scale AI applications faster and more affordably.
Across the firm, there are more than 1,000 generative AI applications being built. And the new Alexa+ is highly personalised, with contextual memory. It has advanced agentic capabilities, meaning it can better navigate the internet in a self-directed way to complete more tasks on customers’ behalf.
We continue to believe AI is a once-in-a-lifetime reinvention of everything we know, the demand is unlike anything we’ve seen before.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy
Amazon is also committed to speeding up e-commerce deliveries. In my experience, this is an area where there is already no competition. As a Prime member, I often order something in the morning and it is dispatched later that same day. Through its Prime Air drone delivery service though, it intends to get items to customers inside an hour.
Elsewhere, its satellite network (Project Kuiper) is targeting the 400m-500m households around the world that don’t have access to broadband. This service eventually aims to compete directly with SpaceX’s Starlink.
Attractive valuation
Now, one risk here is tariffs. Many third-party sellers on Amazon are based in China and many US-based ones source products from Chinese manufacturers. If sellers start dramatically increasing prices, this could impact growth in Amazon’s core retail business.
Meanwhile, a US recession would exacerbate these risks, while also being problematic for AWS. However, the potential for future growth through AWS and digital advertising looks very strong.
Based on 2026 forecasts, the stock is trading at 23.8 times forward earnings. It has rarely been so cheap. I think the rewards far outweigh the risks for long-term investors.
