Amazon Announces Quarterly Earnings

[kjk]

http://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-earnings-2011-4

Amazon had a big miss on earnings, and the shares are down 6% in reaction.
Revenue was a beat, but EPS was off significantly. Looks like the street underestimated Amazon's spending plans.

Wonder what they are spending on?
Earnings call in 1/2 hour-odds that Amazon will finally release some Kindle sales numbers?

edit: ok, found out what they are spending on: new employees. A LOT of them.

[Kali Yuga]

Looks like they still did OK, they just earned less than expected. Not bad given all the new crap they announced or put out in the last quarter.

Kind of interesting that they offer 900k ebooks, not including the PD and free stuff, and 740k (i.e. 85%) of those are $10 or less.

[fjtorres]

4200 new employees.
Revenue actually beat expectations by a lot.
Most of their businesses worldwide grew by 30-40%, their web services business almost doubled.

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/amazon...28?tag=nl.e589

If you look at the growth year-over-year of that CapEx, approximately 80% of that is due to pure capacity and that’s capacity in terms of fulfillment; it’s capacity from an infrastructure standpoint to serve retail business as wel as AWS. And another 10% or 12% is associated with just corporate office space, and the remainder is a number of small items. So, again, the vast majority, approximately 80%, is due to capacity, both infrastructure and our operations capacity.

Translation: Amazon is selling all they can deliver so they are growing to sell even more.

[RockdaMan]

Shares of Amazon.com Inc. turned higher Tuesday, fighting earlier losses after the online retailer’s quarterly earnings missed Wall Street’s projection...

"The concern that people had, that they were going to spend more than the Street was expecting, happened," said Ken Sena, analyst at Evercore Partners. "But when you look at the kind of growth acceleration they are showing on the top line and surpassing pretty much all Street expectations, I think that clearly what they are doing makes sense."

The company has been willing to sacrifice some profitability to win customers and build its new businesses. It has invested heavily in areas such as "cloud computing" -- which allows companies to store data on its servers -- to take on its rivals Google Inc and Apple Inc.

Amazon is also laying out money to open new distribution centers and cement its lead as the world's largest online retailer.

Buy stock now.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/...73P6HV20110426

[SensualPoet]

It's astonishing how much stuff Amazon pushes around the globe, physically, and hence the need for all those new employees and all those new fulfillment centres. It sure is easier just electronically storing and delivering e-books!

[wyndslash]

new employees seem like good news more jobs

[fjtorres]

B

Originally Posted by wyndslash

new employees seem like good news more jobs

Well, somebody has to run the french, german, spanish, and italian Kindle stores.
Plus the ones we haven't heard of yet.
Global players need global staff.

[tubemonkey]

Originally Posted by fjtorres

B

Well, somebody has to run the french, german, spanish, and italian Kindle stores.
Plus the ones we haven't heard of yet.
Global players need global staff.

Just wait until they open shop on the moon - Luna Amazon, Ltd.

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by RockdaMan

Buy stock now.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/...73P6HV20110426

[RockdaMan]

if Amazon weren’t a serious technology company capable of inventing what it needed, if Amazon were “just a store”, its growth would have been limited by technology.

http://daringfireball.net/linked/201...7/bezos-amazon