A box of Amazon.com is pictured on the front porch of a house in Golden, Colorado, July 23, 2008.
Credit: Reuters/Rick WilkingBy Phil WahbaNEW YORK | Di april 26, 2011 8: 47 pm EDT
NEW YORK (Reuters)-Amazon.com gave a trust revenue forecast that suggested his aggressive expansion into new businesses is paying off, soothing concerns about her slimmed-down profit margin.
Shares fell by 1.2 percent after Amazon reported a 32.8% decline in first-quarter profit. But that was a far cry from the big sell-off when the company reported latest quarterly results and shares lost 9 percent.
"The concern that people had, that they were going to spend more than the street had expected, happened," said Ken Sena, an analyst at Evercore Partners. "But makes sense when you look at the nature of the acceleration of the growth that they are displayed on the top line and almost all Street expectations, I think that clearly shows what they are doing."
In recent years, Amazon has fought to win market share through the preliminary programme of the low-cost delivery of the goods retail and by offering cheap electronic books for the Kindle e-reader.
More recently, the heavily invested in areas such as "cloud computing" and "music lockers" where fans save their music on Amazon's servers, to take on his rivals Google Inc. and Apple Inc.
Amazon expects its invest to win market share will work. The forecast current quarter revenue of $ 8.85 billion to 9,65 billion dollars, above Wall Street expectations of $ 8.7 billion, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.
Chief Financial Officer Tom Szkutak told analysts on a conference call that Amazon has money for the development of the technology infrastructure and distribution centres and support growth. Turnover nearly doubled between 2008 and 2010.
For the first quarter of the company, which ended on 31 March, revenue was $ 9857 billion, above the average analyst estimate of 9.57 billion dollars and 38.2% above a year earlier.
In contrast, data hard eMarketer estimated that U.S. retail e-commerce sales rose 13 percent in the quarter, compared with a year earlier.
Amazon's revenue growth was led by a 45 percent increase in North America. Growth elsewhere was 27% excluding the impact of currency exchange rates. Szkutak said that would have been 32 percent if not for massive earthquake Japan last month.
But the net profit in the first quarter was 201 million, or 44 cents per share--down from $ 299 million, or 66 cents per share, a year earlier. That was far below the 61 cents expected by Wall Street, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.
The company posted an 18.2 percent dip in operating profit for the quarter, by calculation of the cost of competing in the highly promotional retail environment, with strengthening investments in cloud computing services.
OPERATIONAL MARGINS SHRINK
Operating margin, that Amazon has said is the best gauge of profitability given the variety of articles that it sells, came to 3.3 percent, in the middle of the range that it had predicted.
Still, that a significant reduction in the margin of 5.5% in the year ago quarter.
"It is not a problem of income, it is a problem of profit," said analyst Colin Gillis BGC Partners. "But at the end of the day, you have to remember that these guys a discount retailer."
Amazon said it expects operating profit in the current quarter from $ 95 million to $ 245 million, after cost of 180 million dollars in damages on the basis of inventory and depreciation of assets. Amazon had operating profit of $ 207 million in the second quarter last year.
Amazon shares were from 1.2 percent to $ 180.17 in trading after the earnings report, after slipping 1.7 percent, or $ 3.12, up to $ 182.30 in the regular session Nasdaq trading.
(Graphic: Amazon.com: income and sales growth r.reuters.com/pet29r)
(Additional reporting by Nichola groom and Lisa Baertlein in Los Angeles and Jessica Wohl and Brad Dorfman in Chicago; Edit by Gary Hill)
No comments:
Post a Comment