Research archive for AMZN

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.

Amazon results post market in the US. OK, normally we end like this, but let us start like this, the stock is up 6.36 percent in the post market session to an all time high of 227.8 Dollars. Let us engage in some copy and pasting here in order to speed things up, taken from the results release (Amazon.com Announces Second Quarter Sales up 51% to $9.91 Billion) some pieces:

Amazon listed on May the 15th 1997 at 18 Dollars a share, trading as high as 30 Dollars a share on its first day. The company put three million shares in the hands of new investors on that day, and you could argue that investment bankers did the company no favours, it popped "too much". It could be argued that the company could have raised more money. Amazon stock in December 1999 traded at nearly 85 Dollars a share.