Amazon in red but beats Wall Street
Woohoo!! We suck, but we're good, because y'all thought we'd suck more than we actually did!!
Amazon has lost more millions than most Third World countries will ever see. It makes a profit (barely) only over the Christmas holiday, and yet it keeps "exceeding expectations". Say what?
The Seattle-based company on Thursday posted a $10 million loss, or 3 cents a share, on sales of $1.08 billion. The results, which surpassed Wall Street projections, were better than those in the same period last year, when the company lost $23.2 million on $847.4 million in sales.
Amazon's shares lost 30 cents to $25.13 in regular Nasdaq trading before the earnings were released.
"They just keep putting together solid quarters where they beat expectations," said Dan Geiman, equity analyst with Seattle-based broker McAdams Wright Ragen, which does not conduct business with Amazon nor own the company's shares.
Of the 28 percent increase in sales, about 6 percentage points resulted from favorable foreign exchange rates on overseas sales. Still, analysts applauded the performance, given consumers' reluctance to spend.
"That's pretty good growth for them," Geiman said.
A key sales booster has been Amazon's offer of free shipping on orders totaling $25 or more. It cost the online merchant $27 million in additional shipping costs in the first quarter, up from $1 million a year earlier.
"It's not going away anytime soon," Amazon Chief Executive Jeff Bezos said in a conference call with analysts. "In fact, it's not likely to go away ever."
Silly me; I always thought the barometer of success for a business was making a profit, which I've always understood to mean bringing in more money than you spend. Granted, I was a History and Anthropology major, so the nuances of business realities may be lost on me, but this seems rather backasswards. If Jeff Bezos was CEO of any other company, he would have been filling out unemployment forms long ago.
So what's the lesson here, kids? Well, it's pretty simply, really. If you're going to lose, lose HUGE. If you're big enough, there will be so many people emotionally and financially invested in you that they can't afford to give up and lose their nest egg.
Jeff Bezos is my new hero....
