In its early days, the conglomerate dealt with more inflation than we're seeing today, and since then it's survived a handful of nasty recessions and come out the other end shining like a new dime. This gives the retail operation steady cash flows so it can run on razor-thin margins at prices its rivals struggle to compete with. With more than $36 billion in cash on its balance sheet and diverse sources of revenue that include a leading cloud services business, Amazon appears destined to produce strong profit growth in the years to come.