E-commerce giant Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) has long been regarded as the king of online retail, and with good reason. Just about anything you can think to buy can be found there, and it’s even branched out into services from streaming video to web services. But it’s been seen paring back expenses lately, and, according to Bloomberg, the latest cutbacks have come to Alexa. Investors didn’t take the news well, and shares slipped fractionally in Wednesday morning’s trading.
For a while now, Amazon had a program that saw developers get paid to produce apps for the Amazon digital voice assistant system. In fact, reports note, it had been running since 2017. But now, those payments are set to stop, and when July 1 dawns, there will be no payments going out for those who are part of the Alexa Developer Rewards Program. For those who think this will mean an automatic end to app development for Alexa, that’s not necessarily so; app developers will still be able to offer in-app purchases to make money in much the same way that Android and iOS apps work.
Increased Competition
While this sounds like bad news—and it might ultimately be—there’s a competitor looking to take a bite out of at least one of Amazon’s new markets: healthcare. That competitor is none other than Walgreens (NASDAQ:WBA), and though Walgreens has been on a downward run for some time now, it’s been putting a lot of extra juice into primary care operations.
Walgreens looks to compete with Amazon in healthcare on the strength of a “human touch” factor that Amazon will have a harder time bringing to bear. That’s debatable at best, but it just goes to show that Amazon will seldom have things all its own way.
Is Amazon a Buy, Hold, or Sell?
Turning to Wall Street, analysts have a Strong Buy consensus rating on AMZN stock based on 41 Buys assigned in the past three months, as indicated by the graphic below. After an 84.82% rally in its share price over the past year, the average AMZN price target of $209.74 per share implies 13.54% upside potential.
