AMZN

Amazon is a global technology and retail platform whose mission is to make it “Earth’s most customer-centric company.” It started as an online bookstore in 1995 but now sells almost everything—groceries, electronics, fashion, streaming video, cloud servers and even healthcare prescriptions. The retail sites (amazon.com plus 20+ country-specific versions) let customers buy goods that Amazon either owns (1P) or that third-party merchants list on its marketplace (3P). Over 200 million people pay for Prime, a subscription that bundles one-day delivery, Prime Video, Music, gaming perks and, in the US, NFL Thursday Night Football. Behind the storefront sits one of the world’s largest logistics networks: 1 000+ warehouses, 50+ cargo jets, 100 000 electric delivery vans and an AI-driven routing system that can drop a toothbrush on a rural porch in under 24 hours. Fees from sellers (Fulfillment by Amazon), advertising slots in search results, and Prime dues turn the once-low-margin store into a rising-margin service franchise. Physical stores (Whole Foods, Amazon Fresh, Amazon Go, Amazon Style) extend the relationship to bricks & mortar, especially in groceries. The other growth engine is Amazon Web Services (AWS). This cloud-computing arm rents out storage, compute and more than 240 higher-level services (AI, databases, analytics) on a pay-as-you-go or long-term contract model. AWS enjoys 33% global share, powers Netflix, the CIA and millions of start-ups, and generated 39% of Amazon’s 2024 operating income on just 19% of revenue. Newer bets include Alexa+ (a $99/mo voice agent), Project Kuiper (satellite internet), Amazon Pharmacy, and a surging ads business that sells pay-per-click placements to brands hunting for shopper eyeballs.

MELI

MercadoLibre (ticker: MELI) is Latin America’s one-stop digital mall and wallet. On the shopping side it runs the region’s largest online marketplace, letting millions of small merchants list goods while MELI handles everything from payment processing to next-day delivery through its in-house logistics arm, Mercado Envíos. Unlike Amazon, most of the inventory is still owned by third-party sellers, so MELI earns fees and advertising revenue rather than taking big inventory risk. Running in parallel is Mercado Pago, a fintech platform that started as the marketplace’s checkout button and has morphed into a full bank-in-an-app. Users can pay bills, tap to pay in stores, earn high-yield returns on digital balances, take out personal or merchant loans and, soon, buy insurance or local mutual funds. Because the wallet works both on and off the marketplace, Pago now processes two-thirds of its volume away from MELI’s own site, embedding the brand into daily life. A third but fast-growing leg is advertising. Sellers pay for sponsored listings and branded display ads that surface their products higher in search results. Ad revenue is tiny in absolute dollars (sub-$2 billion) but carries 80%+ gross margins and is growing triple digits as brands shift budgets from TV to digital. The customer base is wonderfully fragmented: 64 million active consumers, millions of merchants and tens of millions of wallet users spread across 18 countries. No single buyer or seller accounts for more than a rounding error of revenue, which gives MELI pricing power and keeps churn low.

NICE

NICE Ltd. (rhymes with “ice”) is an Israeli-born, U.S.–listed software outfit that helps big companies talk to their customers and stop the bad guys at banks. Think of it as the brains behind the modern contact-center: its flagship CXone Mpower platform sits in the cloud, routes every phone, chat and WhatsApp message, and sprinkles AI “Copilots” on top so agents sound smarter and bots solve easy stuff automatically. A separate Actimize suite does real-time fraud sniffing and anti-money-laundering for financial institutions, while a smaller Public Safety line records 911 calls and body-cam footage for police departments. The business model is subscription-heavy. Roughly three-quarters of revenue now comes from recurring cloud fees paid every month, quarter or year. Services (maintenance and implementation help) add another 21%, and a shrinking 5% comes from old-school on-premise software licenses. More than 400 customers already pay north of $1 million a year, and no single client tops 5% of sales—so cash is predictable and nicely spread out. Geographically, 85% of sales still come from the Americas, but the company is hustling to grow in Europe and Asia via channel partners like RingCentral and big consultancies. After a decade of transformation under former CEO Barak Eilam, ex-SAP exec Scott Russell took the helm in 2025 to push the next growth leg: deeper AI monetisation, faster international roll-outs and continued tuck-in acquisitions.

NVDA

NVIDIA sells the “brains” and networking gear that power everything from video-game PCs to the largest artificial-intelligence (AI) data-centres. Roughly nine dollars out of ten now come from its Data-Centre segment, where customers such as Amazon, Microsoft and Google buy racks of NVIDIA’s Hopper and Blackwell graphics-processing units (GPUs) plus the NVLink and Spectrum-X networking chips that tie them together. The firm also offers subscription software (CUDA libraries, NVIDIA AI Enterprise, DGX Cloud) that helps developers build and run AI models, though this is still only low-single-digit percent of revenue. Because NVIDIA is “fab-less” it outsources chip manufacturing to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC). That keeps capital spending modest while allowing the company to focus on chip design, software and ecosystem support. Its proprietary CUDA programming platform has become the industry standard, locking in both developers and customers. Customer concentration is high—three U.S. hyperscalers account for about a third of sales and well over half of GPU volume if indirect purchases are included—but those same customers have multi-year supply agreements that give NVIDIA unusual visibility and pricing power. The economic model is enviable: FY-25 free-cash-flow (FCF) margin hit 47%, operating margin 62%, and return on invested capital (ROIC) 75%, all while the balance-sheet sits in net cash. Growth has been explosive (five-year revenue CAGR 67%), but still lumpy: a gaming slump in FY-23 showed that earnings can fall sharply when a big end-market pauses.

PYPL

PayPal is the grand-daddy of digital wallets. When a shopper hits “Pay with PayPal” the company pings the card networks, checks for fraud, moves the money, and sends the merchant a “you got paid” message — all in a few hundred milliseconds. That core checkout button still makes up roughly 90% of revenue and covers online purchases, the Venmo app, in-store tap-to-pay, and PayPal-branded debit cards. Around that payment rail sits a growing bundle of services. PayPal lends to shoppers (Buy-Now-Pay-Later and revolving lines) and merchants (working-capital advances), runs large-merchant processing through Braintree APIs, sells fraud-detection software, offers mass-payout tools for gig platforms, and has just launched PayPal Ads and a USD-backed stable-coin (PYUSD). The customer base is wonderfully two-sided: 436 million consumer accounts and more than 35 million active merchants, none of whom represents more than 1% of revenue. The more merchants accept PayPal, the more useful the wallet is for shoppers — and vice-versa. Geographically, the business is split 57% United States and 43% rest-of-world; management is currently pushing Venmo, debit cards and redesigned checkout flows into Europe to re-ignite growth.

TTD

The Trade Desk (ticker: TTD) runs a cloud-based ad-buying platform called a demand-side platform, or DSP. Think of it as Bloomberg for media buyers: agencies and big brands log in, set a budget and bid in real time on individual ad impressions across streaming TV, websites, mobile apps, podcasts and even digital billboards. TTD skims a 15-20% platform fee from every dollar that flows through the pipes – no hardware, no physical goods, just software and data. Roughly 97% of revenue is usage-based platform fees tied to ad spend, so sales rise and fall with marketers’ budgets. A thin layer of add-ons – data marketplace, identity services (Unified ID 2.0), and white-label “powered-by-TTD” DSPs for retailers such as Walmart – make up the rest. Customers are mainly the six global ad-agency holding companies plus thousands of direct-to-brand marketers; no single account tops 10% of revenue. On the other side of the trade sit thousands of publishers, from Disney’s Hulu to tiny blogs. Because TTD does not own any media inventory itself, it can pitch true independence versus Google, Amazon and Meta, who all sell their own ads. The model is asset-light (cap-ex ~4% of sales), generates >80% gross margins and has produced a 31% revenue CAGR over the past five years.

UNH

UnitedHealth Group (ticker: UNH) is the jumbo jet of U.S. healthcare. Through its UnitedHealthcare arm it sells medical insurance to employers, seniors on Medicare Advantage, state Medicaid agencies and individuals who buy coverage on the Affordable Care Act exchanges. Policyholders pay a monthly premium; UnitedHealthcare then foots the medical bills and tries to spend less than it collects. UNH’s second engine is Optum, a health-services powerhouse that includes Optum Rx (pharmacy-benefit manager that negotiates drug prices and fills ~1.8 billion scripts a year), Optum Health (40,000 clinicians in clinics, surgery centers, home-health teams and virtual-care apps) and Optum Insight (software and data-analytics tools that help hospitals code, bill and manage revenue). Optum sells these services not only to UnitedHealthcare but to rival insurers, providers and employers, creating an “arms-dealer” revenue stream. Revenue is astonishingly diversified: roughly 79% from recurring insurance premiums, 12% from pharmacy transactions and the rest from services and tech-licensing. No single customer—even Uncle Sam’s Medicare program—accounts for more than 10% of sales. This diversification plus the must-have nature of healthcare makes the business resilient in recessions. The company’s secret sauce is scale. Covering 53 million insured lives and touching 90 million pharmacy members gives UNH unmatched bargaining power with hospitals and drug makers, a data set that trains ever-smarter risk models and a float of prepaid premiums that funds operations at almost no cost.

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