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The template only earns its keep if you actually put two cases next to each other.

This is the reason every teardown answers the same questions in the same order. Put a luxury house beside a console platform and the differences stop being vibes — one is refusing sales to protect a price, the other is selling below cost to collect a toll, and both are defending a moat.

Case ACase B

Luxury · Prada Group (HKEX: 1913)

Miu Miu

The second line Miuccia Prada launched under her own childhood nickname in 1993, which in 2025 produced €1.79 billion of net revenues from 162 stores — and every euro of Prada Group's growth.

Technology · NASDAQ: AMZN

Amazon

Runs a near-breakeven retail operation at enormous scale, and earns essentially all of its profit from renting out the two things that operation forced it to build — computing capacity and shelf placement.

The thesis in one line

Miu Miu grew thirty percent while opening fifteen stores. Growth that comes through doors you already own is the only kind that cannot be bought.

The store is not the business. The store is the customer acquisition cost for the businesses.

Verdict

Watch it

Own it

Moat

Narrow

Brand · Counter-positioning · Distribution

Wide

Scale economics · Network effects · Process power · Switching costs

Porter's five forces

Competitive rivalry

Threat of new entrants

Threat of substitutes

Buyer power

Supplier power

Competitive rivalry

Threat of new entrants

Threat of substitutes

Buyer power

Supplier power

Headline figures

Net revenues: €1.79B
Stores: 162
Growth in 2024: +93%
Share of Prada Group: 31.3%

Net sales: $638B
AWS share of operating income: ~58%
Retail operating margin: ~5.4%
Third-party share of units: ~60%

Unit economics

One Miu Miu directly operated store, 2025

A Miu Miu store out-sells a Prada store by roughly 22% on a smaller footprint and a lower average price. That gap is the entire case: the younger brand is not just growing faster, it is working harder per square metre.

One $50 third-party item sold through Amazon

Amazon captures roughly 38% of the sale price and carries none of the inventory risk. The seller took the risk, paid for the warehouse, and then paid again to be found in a search of Amazon's own catalogue.

What would change her mind

Miu Miu's growth turning negative in any full year, or the group holding growth above 20% only by opening more than thirty net stores a year, would tell me the like-for-like engine has stalled and the brand is a cycle rather than an institution. Conversely, a credible named successor or co-creative director appointed alongside Miuccia at Miu Miu — with two collections shipped and sold through — would remove the single largest risk in the case, and I would move to Own it via Prada Group at a materially higher multiple than 13.5x.

If AWS revenue growth falls below 15% for two consecutive quarters while segment operating margin also declines, the cloud business is being commoditised rather than merely contested, and the capex is being spent defending share rather than buying growth. That combination — decelerating growth and compressing margin at the same time — breaks the thesis outright. A single weak quarter on either measure alone does not.

No mechanisms in common

These two share no tagged mechanism, which usually means the comparison is about contrast rather than pattern — a useful thing to know before you start writing.