Amazon.com Inc (AMZN)

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Amazon (AMZN) Stock-Split Stock That Is Historically Cheap and Begging to Be Bought
By: Motley Fool | July 28, 2022

• Stock-split euphoria has taken hold of Wall Street, with a select few stock-split stocks standing out as incredible bargains.

It's been quite the year for Wall Street. The broad-based S&P 500 produced its worst first-half to a year in more than a half-century, while the growth stock-driven Nasdaq Composite tumbled by more than 30%. Consumers are dealing with historically high inflation (9.1% in June 2022), as well as the ripple effects on the energy supply chain of Russia invading Ukraine. To top things off, the COVID-19 pandemic is still ongoing and adversely impacting supply chains globally.

Yet amid this chaos, investors have developed a case of stock-split euphoria. A stock split is a way for a publicly traded company to alter its share price and outstanding share count without having an effect on its market cap or operating performance. A forward stock split, which is what tends to get investors most excited, reduces the nominal share price of a stock and makes it more affordable for retail investors.

Forward stock splits are almost always viewed as bullish events. The thinking here is that a company wouldn't need to split in the first place if it wasn't executing on its growth strategy and hadn't seen its share price rise as a result.

But among this veritable sea of stock-split stocks in 2022 stands two widely held companies that are historically cheaper than they've ever been and are begging to be bought by patient investors.

Amazon

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the second stock-split stock that's historically cheap and begging to be bought by opportunistic long-term investors is FAANG stock Amazon (AMZN 0.23%).

Amazon rode Alphabet's coattails and announced its intention to conduct a 20-for-1 forward stock split in March. However, it beat Alphabet to the punch by gaining shareholder approval and executing its split on June 6.

Consistent with prevailing recessionary fears, Amazon's shares have come under pressure in 2022. As a company that generates the bulk of its revenue from e-commerce sales, historically high inflation and a potential economic slowdown represent a worrisome combination. It also doesn't help that retail giant Walmart issued a profit warning following the closing bell on July 25.

But just as with Alphabet, examining a one- or-two-quarter performance for Amazon won't tell you a lot about where this company is headed. If you really dig in and look at the big picture, you'll see a company where practically everything is going right, even in the wake of historically high inflation.

Most people are familiar with Amazon because of its leading online marketplace. In March, eMarketer released a study estimating that Amazon would collect just shy of 40% of all online retail sales in the U.S. in 2022. By comparison, the company's 14 closest competitors are only expected to account for 31% of e-commerce sales in the U.S. on a combined basis.

Yet retail sales are a capital-intensive and generally low-margin segment for Amazon. Though e-commerce is responsible for most of the company's sales, it's the ancillary opportunities created from e-commerce, as well as Amazon's other operating segments, that are key to its success.

As an example, Amazon's online marketplace has helped the company sign up more than 200 million Prime members worldwide. That's tens of billions of dollars in annual fees the company collects from Prime, which it's able to use to support its vast logistics network, undercut brick-and-mortar retailers on price, or perhaps reinvest in other high-growth initiatives.

The fascinating aspect about Amazon is that its leading online retail segment could generate no growth or modestly negative growth, and the company's operating cash flow can still soar. That's because it's generating considerably juicier operating margins from advertising, subscriptions, and cloud services.

Whereas Google Cloud chimes in as the world's No. 3 cloud-service provider with 8% share, Amazon Web Services (AWS) accounted for 33% of global cloud service sales in the first quarter, according to Canalys. AWS has been growing by 30% to 40% annually. Even though AWS only accounts for roughly an eighth of Amazon's net sales, it's consistently been the company's leading generator of operating income.

Over the trailing five-year period, Amazon has averaged a multiple of 31.1 times its operating cash flow. This is a premium that Wall Street and investors have been comfortable paying for shares of Amazon since 2010. Yet based on Wall Street's consensus, Amazon could more than triple its cash flow by 2025 (relative to 2021), and it would be valued at a multiple of 8.6 times cash flow. That makes it historically cheap and an ideal stock-split stock for long-term investors to buy right now.

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