Following up on the post immediately below, "Profit/Non-profit: What is Amazon Up To? (AMZN)".
The one line digest of results: Meet on Erns, Beat on Revs, Light on Q4 Revs (call it 'conservative').
See also: "One Last Note on Amazon: How Many Companies Brag about the Number of Robots They've Added? (AMZN)"
From Reuters:
Amazon.com Inc posted a narrower quarterly loss and better-than-expected sales on Thursday as the company expanded aggressively at home and made inroads into overseas markets, sending its shares up nearly 8 percent in after-hours trade.Tech Trader Daily said of the expectations:
Its top-line performance underscored the company's strong momentum as the world's largest Internet retailer prepares to do battle during a crucial U.S. holiday season, which some experts say could be the slowest in years.
Rival Ebay Inc gave a disappointing holiday forecast last week, saying the U.S. economic environment, including consumer confidence, had deteriorated in part because of the U.S. government shutdown.
Amazon forecast sales of between $23.5 billion to $26.5 billion, which analysts called conservative.
"It'll be a somewhat difficult macro environment in the fourth quarter," said Morningstar analyst R.J. Jottovy. "But it looks like the revenue momentum will continue into the fourth quarter."...MORE
"...The company said it lost 9 cents a share on revenue of $17.09 billion. Analysts were expecting the company to report an operating loss of 11 cents a share, on revenue of $16.7 billion."On the forward guidance Zacks wrote:
...Guidance for its Q4's all-important holiday season is for revenues between $23.5 - $26.5 billion, the high end being beyond our current consensus of $26.05 billion. Not too shabby for a company started in 1994 to sell books over the Internet....ZDNet says watch Amazon's cloud business Web Services rather than retail in Q4 while the geeks at GeekWire point to another metric:
