SEATTLE _ President-elect Donald Trump seems to have no love for Amazon.com's CEO Jeff Bezos, who also owns the Washington Post, a newspaper that aggressively investigated the candidate during a no-holds barred campaign.
He also once said that Amazon, which dominates e-commerce, has a "huge antitrust problem," given that the company "is controlling so much of what they're doing.
So what are the prospects for America's fifth largest company by market value under an administration led by the Republican firebrand?
Bezos built an empire based, in part, on Internet sales of goodies that stem from the overseas factories that Trump has said have stolen American jobs.
Free trade fills the company's sails _ as it builds a planetary network of warehouses, transportation and profitable data centers that are turning it into a truly global store. At the end of 2015, more than a third of Amazon's physical footprint was in countries other than the U.S., and about 32 percent of its retail sales were made overseas. Trump has also railed against the trade deals that facilitate some of that commerce, saying they're not advantageous enough to the U.S.
Investors seemed to sniff some danger: Shares were down 2.77 percent at $765.92, even as the wider stock market shrugged off initial fears about a Trump presidency.
Amazon didn't respond to a request for comment. But a look at the boilerplate language in its annual report warns investors about the potential negative impact of trade protection measures, export duties and such, including "laws and policies of the U.S. and other jurisdictions affecting trade, foreign investment, loans, and taxes."
A hostile environment in its U.S. home base would add to some of the policy issues it has run into overseas, including anti-trust and tax investigations in Europe.
As the dust settles, other retailers are also looking into how a change in free-trade stance by the U.S. administration may affect them.
J. Craig Shearman, a spokesman for the National Retail Federation, a trade group for big retailers, showed concern in a blog post Wednesday about Trump's opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a free trade agreement that would cut tariffs, as well as the president-elect's threats to "tear up" the North American Free Trade Agreement and impose "huge" tariffs on Chinese imports. "NRF strongly opposes new tariffs and supports TPP and other free trade agreements because retailers rely heavily on imported merchandise," he wrote.
