Specialist
Former Regional Director at Amazon.com Inc
Agenda
- State of Amazon's (NASDAQ: AMZN) grocery business, highlighting competitive positioning relative to Walmart (NYSE: WMT), Kroger (NYSE: KR) and Aldi
- Short-, medium-, and long-term impacts of the novel coronavirus pandemic, highlighting potential rise in online penetration
- Sales and margin outlook and impacts of pricing pressure from suppliers
- Outlook for 2020 and beyond
Questions
1.
What are your thoughts on the grocery industry? What key trends and themes do you think we should pay attention to? How might you describe the operating environment?
2.
How do you think the novel coronavirus pandemic has impacted Amazon Fresh and the grocery industry more broadly?
3.
How likely do you think it is that the uptick in Amazon Fresh and broader online grocery delivery services is temporary, due to the coronavirus, vs permanent? What could Amazon do to make a first-time buyer a more permanent customer?
4.
Could you elaborate on the logistics and supply chain pain points Amazon Fresh could have as it tries to meet surging demand over the next couple of weeks?
5.
What logistics infrastructure has Amazon put in place so far for Fresh? What do you think needs to be done to make the delivery infrastructure more agile?
6.
What are the margin implications of the coronavirus situation?
7.
How confident are you in Amazon’s ability to automate the tasks you’ve been speaking about, such as picking, in the near to mid-term given its technological prowess in other arms of the business? You’ve talked about how Fresh has been very manual.
8.
What are the unit economics for Fresh deliveries? Could you break down the average basket size and packaging and labour costs?
9.
Do you think the coronavirus will be a net margin positive or negative for Fresh? What are the cost mix implications?
10.
What are your thoughts on Amazon’s plans to expand its bricks-and-mortar grocery business through Whole Foods, Amazon Fresh and the standalone grocery stores it is rumoured to be considering opening?
11.
What are your thoughts on Amazon Fresh’s competitive positioning vs Instacart, Deliveroo or other competitors? How do you expect it to evolve?
12.
What do you think is the long-term trajectory of this industry? Do you expect consolidation in the online and grocery delivery sector? What are your expectations for industry-wide penetration over the next couple of years?
13.
What are your thoughts on the Amazon Go stores? How bullish or bearish are you on them? How do you think Amazon approaches them within its larger grocery strategy?
14.
What do you think Amazon’s expansion plans are for the cheaper Amazon Fresh grocery stores? How do you think the company is approaching that?
15.
What are your thoughts on Amazon’s relationship with United Natural Foods? How likely do you think it is that it could self-distribute? It’s a rumour I’ve heard.
16.
How do you think Amazon’s CEO, Jeff Bezos, thinks about Fresh? How committed do you think he personally is to that business?
17.
Outside of logistics, what challenges to customer adoption and growing average basket size do you think Amazon will face when growing Fresh in the near to mid-term?
18.
What are the higher- or lower-margin products for Fresh delivery? Do you think this is pretty similar to the industry at large?
19.
Do you have any closing comments? Is there anything you want to touch on, that we didn’t get a chance to discuss?
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