Graphic: Marcus Wohlsen/Wired. Data: Walmart

Amazon doesn't make a lot of money in the profit sense, which is typically the only sense that matters. But the investors who sent Amazon's stock soaring after-hours last night were likely looking at a different set of numbers.

For the fourth quarter, which includes the holiday season, Amazon reported $21.27 billion in sales. Sounds like a lot of money, but compared to what? How about 2008, when Amazon sold less than that ($19.17 billion) for the whole year.

But that's not the only big total. Amazon also reported its total sales for 2012 topped $61 billion, up $13 billion from last year. In 2007, Amazon's annual net sales were $14.84 billion. In other words, Amazon's sales have quadrupled over the past five years. But profit? Not so much. Amazon ended 2012 with a $39 million loss on the year, which the company blamed on the cost of delivering all the stuff it sells, as well as on the price of digital content.

Skeptics like Matt Yglesias at Slate have seized on Amazon's money-losing ways, and contend that Amazon can only post such massive sales numbers at the expense of ever turning a real profit:

Amazon, as best I can tell, is a charitable organization being run by elements of the investment community for the benefit of consumers. ... Amazon sells things to people at prices that seem impossible because it actually is impossible to make money that way.

Certainly investors seem to have as much patience with Amazon as they do impatience with Apple, which made $13.1 billion in profits in the most recent quarter alone. Amazon's stock price has hovered around its all-time high recently, while Apple shares have plunged.

But Apple might not be the right behemoth to use as a benchmark for Amazon's recent performance. In 1994, Walmart's net sales topped $60 billion for the first time, the neighborhood that Amazon's playing in today. A decade later, Walmart's sales had nearly quadrupled to $256 billion. Last year, Walmart's sales clocked in at just south of $444 billion.

Amazon may or may not continue to climb its own trajectory toward a half-trillion. But at its current flattening growth rate, Walmart may not get there for years. In the meantime, Amazon's curve looks like Walmart's in the 1990s, the decade Walmart pulled away from the competition to become a singular force. Amazon investors might like the idea of getting in on what looks like Walmart in the early days of its rise, even as Walmart tries to make its business look more like Amazon. The question is how long they'll wait around for Amazon to make money as it goes about trying to rule the world.

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