What To Expect From Amazon’s Q4 Earnings
Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) is scheduled to report its results for the fourth quarter on Thursday, February 2nd. The company significantly outperformed expectations in the first six months of 2016 but missed bottom line estimates in the third quarter. In the first nine months of the year, Amazon registered 29% growth in revenue to over $92 billion driven by solid growth across divisions especially Amazon Web Services (AWS), the company’s public cloud division.
In the fourth quarter, the company expects net sales of $42.0-$45.5 billion and operating income anywhere from zero to $1.25 billion. We believe Amazon should be able to comfortably achieve its sales target considering it was able to again command a 38% share in the 2016 online holiday season sales in the U.S., which grew 20% year over year. [1]
In the first nine months of 2016, Amazon’s operating income grew 161% to over $2.9 billion and the company’s operating margin improved by 160 basis points to 3.2% owing to margin expansion in both the e-commerce and cloud businesses. This helped Amazon post extraordinary 1300% year-over-year (y-o-y) earnings growth in the period to $3.43 a share. This indicates that both gross margin improvements (due to growing third-party business) and efficiency improvements are offsetting the increased investments in Prime and other growth initiatives. While the company should continue to see improved profitability going forward, Amazon’s margins could witness a slight decrease in the near term owing to increased investments.
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Notes:- “two extra shopping days make 2016 the biggest holiday yet“, Slice Intelligence, Jan 5 2017 [↩]