Amazon Web Services is the Driver Behind Another Great Amazon Quarter

Amazon.com (Nasdaq: AMZN) reported earnings after the market closed on Thursday and it was another great quarter for the internet giant:

Net sales of $51.0 billion, up from $35.7 billion (43% increase year-over-year)
Operating income rose to $1.9 billion, up from $1.0 billion (92% increase YOY)
Earnings of $3.27 per share, up from $1.48 per share (121% increase YOY)

If you’ll recall from earlier this week, I was primarily concerned with the performance of Amazon Web Service (AWS), as its high-margin business line would help overcome the margin shortcomings felt in the retail side of things. AWS did not disappoint, with total sales during the quarter of $5.4 billion, or just over 10% of total sales. Continue reading “Amazon Web Services is the Driver Behind Another Great Amazon Quarter” →

Portfolio X-Ray: Amazon.com

Note: Read this introduction to see what I am doing in this series.

About Amazon.com
Amazon.com (Nasdaq: AMZN) is pretty well known, so I’m not going to go into much deyail about what they do. The company went online in 1995, primarily as a retailer of books. They managed to survive the dot-com bubble, a time when every company that had something to do with the internet, or technology in general, was experiencing sky high valuations. Amazon emerged relatively unscathed, and even benefited a bit from the failure of a lot of fly-by-night internet retailers, the most famous perhaps being Pets.com. As if led by the will of its founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, Amazon emerged triumphant, and gradually morphed into the mega-online retailer it is today, mostly by acquiring other successful online retailers like Zappos. Now Amazon is often viewed as a one-stop shop for most items, and truly changed the way that many retailers viewed the internet.

In it’s own words, Amazon keeps what it is and what it does simple:

Amazon.com opened its virtual doors on the World Wide Web in July 1995 and offers Earth’s Biggest Selection. We seek to be Earth’s most customer-centric company for four primary customer sets: consumers, sellers, enterprises, and content creators. In addition, we provide services, such as advertising services and co-branded credit card agreements. Continue reading “Portfolio X-Ray: Amazon.com” →

A Quick Note

Regular readers may have noticed this, but I thought I would just point it out anyway since I don’t have anything else to write about today. I should have said something a few weeks ago, but I just kept putting it off for no good reason.

Anyway, I hope you are digging the new look to my blog here. I got bored with the old layout and decided to change it up a little bit. But there is also another change that you may not have noticed, unless you click through and follow some of the links. If you click on a link, like this one, you end up over at Amazon.com with an opportunity to buy something that I have mentioned. Normally, you can do this and just enjoy the item, but if you buy it from the link, I’ll get a little kick back. I’m not expecting to make any real money doing this, but I figure if it is something that you were going to buy anyway, maybe you’ll buy it from my link and I’ll make $0.35 or whatever. Not a hard sell, but just keep this in mind if you find yourself on Amazon from my blog. Continue reading “A Quick Note” →