I'd say 'because the market still has confidence in Amazon', which is reflected by their market cap. While market cap has no relation whatsoever to the profitability of a company, it does allow Amazon to keep investing in expanding into all the directions they are expanding in. At current valuations, they only have to add ~5M shares (on a current total of ~450M outstanding) to raise around ~$1B. This is not a free ride though, they _will_ have to be able to jack up their profits somewhere in the future, otherwise the stock will sink and they will have a hard time to keep up their strategy of expansion.
I'm quite surprised they have been able to keep up this game for so long myself, but it's not totally crazy. Online shopping is has been growing like crazy for since Amazon started, the market today is probably at least a 100 times larger than ~10 years ago. Some day though, growth will start to level off, and looking at Amazon's earnings releases over the last 2 years or so, it seems like we're almost there. It's going to be very interesting to see what happens to Amazon when they cannot keep growing any bigger.
I guess I don't see your implied meaning of "relatively minor." If the market has had confidence in amazon for so many years, then wouldn't any event that causes them to lose confidence be considered the opposite of minor?
I'm quite surprised they have been able to keep up this game for so long myself, but it's not totally crazy. Online shopping is has been growing like crazy for since Amazon started, the market today is probably at least a 100 times larger than ~10 years ago. Some day though, growth will start to level off, and looking at Amazon's earnings releases over the last 2 years or so, it seems like we're almost there. It's going to be very interesting to see what happens to Amazon when they cannot keep growing any bigger.