Research archive for AMZN

I have heard it being said that this is the company that does not make a profit, it is gearing up on massive infrastructure instead, taking their sweet time. Last evening post the market close, Amazon.com Announces Third Quarter Sales up 20% to $20.58 Billion. That sounds great, right?

Last week it was Amazon.com's turn to in the earnings season to release their results. I am busy reading the book about Jeff Bezos and Amazon, so the team here decided to leave the report for me now that I am back from the Cape.

Amazon have disrupted the book market again through their service called "Kindle Unlimited". The service gives you access to more than 600 000 books to read for a fee of $9.99 a month. This is great if you do a big amount of reading as the monthly subscription fee is about the cost of one book. The downside is that you won't find any recent titles or titles from the top 5 publishing houses.

Over the last week Amazon has been in the news for a couple of things. The first is a dispute that is going on with a publishing house called Hachette Book Group over the pricing model of e-books. The basis of the dispute is over who controls the price and how the profits are split. The current model is where the publishing house gives wholesalers like Amazon a 50% discount on the retail price and then it is up to Amazon to set the price. The model that Hachette is fighting for is to have the publishing house determine the price and the profit margin of the retailer.

Yesterday Amazon released another product to their offering, the Fire smartphone. In terms of looks, it is similar to an iPhone with a slightly larger screen.

Last week Amazon came out with their first quarter's figures, and they continue to grow. Their revenue figure is $19.7 billion which is up 23% compared to last year's quarter. Their cloud based service had increased revenue of 60%, to $1.2 billion, which is small compared to the rest of the company but cloud based computing is the future (good place to be building a base). A concern for Amazon is their cost of shipping, which is up 66% over 2 years and up 31% compared to the last quarter, which has resulted in Amazon testing doing their own shipping.

Amazon have launched their new hardware product, called Fire TV. 99 bucks a box, those bucks are greenbacks, not Randelas. And coupled with their (Amazon's) prime offering (at 99 Dollars a month) is set to give you everything that you need. Not need of course. Pressure turns to Apple to update their offering: Amazon 'Fire TV' Raises Ante for Apple, Says Piper.

On Thursday Amazon released their 4th quarter results and 2013 full year results. Amazon grew sales for the last three months of the year from $21.27 billion to $25.59 billion, which is a mind numbing figure for me considering that it is only for 3 months. For the full year they had revenue of $74.4 billion up from $60 billion, growth of 22%. From all those sales they made a net income of $274 million; yes they didn't even break the billion mark.

It's been a busy couple of weeks with results been thrown at us both locally and in the US. On Friday we received results from Amazon which I will cover now.

After covering Amazon for a few years now I am sure you get the point that these guys are not focused on present earnings. Somehow Jeff Bezos has managed to convince shareholders that the earnings will come and that they must just be patient. Not much has changed as the company who trades at $265 reported earnings of 18c for the quarter. This comfortably beat expectations of 10c but it is revenues which show the real picture here.

Yesterday Amazon reported its first loss for a quarter in 9 years as the company continues to invest in the future at the expense of current earnings. Net sales increased 27% to $13.81bn compared to $10.88bn this quarter last year. Because earnings have been scarce, sales have been the main gauge of growth for this company so this figure is important to note. The operating loss equated to $28 million compared to the $79 million profit made last quarter. This equated to 60c a share.

On Thursday we had second quarter earnings from the lead online retailer in the world, Amazon. This is a very interesting company to analyze because it is embracing a huge expansion plan in order to produce big profits in the future. This is unusual for a company with a market cap of over $100bn yet is not actually making much money for the time being. Investors are putting a huge amount of faith into the future of this company. When you look at the fundamentals you can see why.

Yesterday we had numbers from online retailer Amazon which came in way below expectations causing the share to drop 11% in after hour trade. For the record, this is not a macro issue, the demand is there. The issue is coming from the company's huge growth drive at the expense of short term earnings.

Yesterday we had disappointing results come out from one of our recommended technology stocks in New York, Amazon. The online retailer posted a 73% drop in third quarter profits mainly because operating margins were hurt by big capital expenditure in warehouses, data centres and digital content offerings. Even though quarterly sales were up 44%, this was overshadowed by analyst earnings expectations of 24c compared to the actual earnings of 14c. Understandably the stock has tumbled 11% post the market close.

Do we finally have a competitor to the iPad? Ironically Amazon's Kindle was the first (mainstream) tablet on the market. It was purely for reading however and Apple, as usual, took it to a new level with the iPad. Well yesterday Amazon presented its new Kindle Fire and the reviews, for the first time, looked good. From what was originally just a reader the new Kindle has directly taken on the iPad using Android software with access to Amazon's new app store.