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The Founder's Notes

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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.

Luxury · HKEX: 1913

Prada

A Milanese leather house that owns its own factories, listed itself in Hong Kong rather than Milan, and now runs two competing brands — Prada and Miu Miu — designed by the same woman, plus a newly acquired Versace.

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

Prada listed in Hong Kong in 2011 at HK$39.50. Fifteen years, a second brand, and a doubled business later, the share still trades around HK$40.
The store is not the business. The store is the customer acquisition cost for the businesses.

Verdict

Own it
Own it

Moat

Wide

Brand · Process power · Counter-positioning

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
€5.72B
Adjusted EBIT margin
23.2%
Consecutive quarters of growth
20
IPO price, June 2011
HK$39.50
Net sales
$638B
AWS share of operating income
~58%
Retail operating margin
~5.4%
Third-party share of units
~60%

Unit economics

One euro of Prada Group net revenue, 2025

Twenty-three cents of adjusted EBIT per euro of sales, held roughly flat while absorbing €535 million of capex and a month of a loss-making Versace. Prada's margin is not the highest in luxury. It is the least dependent on any single collection selling out.

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

If Miu Miu's retail sales growth falls below zero in any full year while the Prada brand is also flat or negative, the portfolio thesis is dead and this is a single-brand company with a succession problem, worth materially less than 13.5x. I would also reverse on governance: if the group funds a further large acquisition by issuing equity or by levering past roughly 1.5x EBITDA, the 1999–2006 pattern is repeating and the discipline I am paying for does not exist.
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.

1 mechanism in common

vertical integration