Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) is everyone’s friend, even those in the publishing industry that is having a feud with the giant at the moment, Marshall Sonenshine said in a recent discussion on Bloomberg Surveillance.
The comment comes from the Sonenshine Partners chairman and managing partner as Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) is currently locked in a dispute against Hachette Book Group USA over pricing and revenue sharing in selling books. Asked whether the internet commerce giant is a friend or a foe, Sonenshine explained:
“First of all, in terms of our business, they’re very much our friend. They are everybody’s friend. You will notice, by the way, that even The Authors Guild was very tepid in their critique of Amazon and all this. Secondly, I think everyone has to be very, very careful. We don’t know the terms of the negotiations that are going on between Amazon and Hachette. Everyone wants to be an armchair commentator on this one…By the way, Hachette is not a small fry company. It’s a$10 billion company. It’s not so small. It’s a little bit like when you turned on your TV last year and saw that you couldn’t get your sports game on because the cable companies and the sports network didn’t agree on terms. You don’t know who was right or who was wrong and they could both vie for your opinion in that matter. We don’t know what those terms are.”
Furthermore, according to Sonenshine, this is not so much about Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) bullying publishers and authors, it’s about a company which has gotten disruptive power in an industry that was ripe for it. He said.
“Thirdly, what I think this is really about, is not bullying by Amazon. I think this is about the market power that came from being the innovator in an industry that badly needed it…That big crashing sound that you keep hearing in the book industry is the sound of creative disruption. This is an industry that needed it. By the way, the big publishers were on the wrong side of history in most of the debates that have happened over the last decade in this sector.”
Watch the video below where much more was discussed.
Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) investors includes Ems Capital managed by Edmond M. Safra. This firm reported 82,183 share in the internet commerce giant by the end of the first quarter. Another investor is Two Sigma Advisors managed by John Overdeck and David Siegel which reported 80,633 shares in the company also in the same period.
Disclosure: None
