Satellite radio giant Sirius XM Holdings (NASDAQ: SIRI) was a millionaire-maker once upon a time. The stock soared in the dot-com boom, and many Sirius XM investors expected the good times to keep rolling for a long time.
But Sirius XM’s stock price sunk when the dot-com bubble popped, and it hasn’t looked like a millionaire maker for a very long time. These days, Sirius XM offers a generous dividend yield and some hope of a turnaround, and master investor Warren Buffett is buying the stock in 2024. So this stock still has some appeal, but I find it hard to get excited about Sirius XM’s focus on the clunky satellite radio service. Why not retool the business around online streaming instead, now that high-speed wireless internet connections are easily available almost everywhere?
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I respect Buffett’s Sirius XM strategy and hope it works out for investors who follow his lead. I’d rather watch the company’s turnaround efforts from the sidelines, though.
There are other winners from the dot-com era on the market today. Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN) didn’t just survive the bubble-popping, but thrived as it essentially created two new industries from whole cloth. Let’s take a deeper look at this e-commerce and cloud computing giant.
With a $2.1 trillion market cap and a seat at the “Magnificent Seven” table, Amazon is a true business giant.
The global e-commerce network saw $131 billion of net sales in the third quarter, up from $120 billion in the year-ago report. The Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud computing platform delivered $10.4 billion of operating profit. Annual sales have been soaring forever and Amazon’s free cash flows are back to a cool $43 billion a year after a brief dip.
This is not a turnaround story. Amazon’s management has a knack for leading the charge into new business ideas, resulting in strong financial results. The company built a worldwide computing service that puts Google parent Alphabet (NASDAQ: GOOG) (NASDAQ: GOOGL) to shame in many ways, and the Prime shipping service makes FedEx (NYSE: FDX) look outdated. Same-day delivery, anyone?
Looking ahead, Amazon is expanding its international e-commerce operations while jockeying for position in the artificial intelligence (AI) boom. This multiple-trillion-dollar company still behaves like a hungry little upstart. Yet, the stock is modestly priced at 3.4 times sales and 43 times earnings today.
