Tech Stock
Earnings Alert: Amazon.com (AMZN) Announces Fourth Quarter Sales up 15% to
$29.33 Billion
Point
Roberts WA, NEW YORK, NY – January 30, 2015 - Investorideas.com, a global news
source covering leading sectors including
tech stocks reports on Amazon.com, Inc. (AMZN) earning news.
The
stock is trading at $347.45 up 35.67(11.44%) as
11:11AM EST, making it one of the best performing tech stocks this week
in a round of earnings from MSFT, AAPL and GOOG. Google Inc. (GOOG) is
currently trading at $529.91, up 19.25(3.77%) following its earnings report on
the close yesterday.
Amazon.com,
Inc. (AMZN) reports financial results for its fourth quarter ended December 31,
2014.
Operating
cash flow increased 25% to $6.84 billion for the trailing twelve months,
compared with $5.47 billion for the trailing twelve months ended December 31,
2013. Free cash flow decreased to $1.95 billion for the trailing twelve months,
compared with $2.03 billion for the trailing twelve months ended December 31,
2013.
Common
shares outstanding plus shares underlying stock-based awards totaled 483
million on December 31, 2014, compared with 476 million one year ago.
Fourth Quarter 2014
Net
sales increased 15% to $29.33 billion in the fourth quarter, compared with
$25.59 billion in fourth quarter 2013. Excluding the $895 million unfavorable
impact from year-over-year changes in foreign exchange rates throughout the
quarter, net sales increased 18% compared to fourth quarter 2013.
Operating
income was $591 million in the fourth quarter, compared with operating income
of $510 million in fourth quarter 2013.
Net
income was $214 million in the fourth quarter, or $0.45 per diluted share,
compared with net income of $239 million, or $0.51 per diluted share, in fourth
quarter 2013.
Full Year 2014
Net
sales increased 20% to $88.99 billion, compared with $74.45 billion in 2013.
Excluding the $636 million unfavorable impact from year-over-year changes in
foreign exchange rates throughout the year, net sales increased 20% compared
with 2013.
Operating
income was $178 million, compared with operating income of $745 million in
2013.
Net
loss was $241 million, or $0.52 per diluted share, compared with net income of
$274 million, or $0.59 per diluted share, in 2013.
“When
we raised the price of Prime membership last year, we were confident that
customers would continue to find it the best bargain in the history of
shopping. The data is in and customers agree — on a base of tens of millions,
worldwide paid membership grew 53% last year — 50% in the U.S. and even a bit
faster outside the U.S.,” said Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com.
“Prime is a one-of-a-kind, all-you-can-eat, physical-digital hybrid — in 2014
alone we paid billions of dollars for Prime shipping and invested $1.3 billion
in Prime Instant Video. We’ll continue to work hard for our Prime members.”
Highlights
•
Amazon announced Prime Now, a new service offering paid one-hour and free
two-hour delivery on tens of thousands of daily essentials via a new mobile
app. The service is currently available in Manhattan and will expand to other
cities this year.
•
Amazon introduced Prime Photos, providing free unlimited photo storage in
Amazon Cloud Drive. Prime members now have a simple, secure place to store
their existing collections of photos, automatically upload new photos as they
are taken, and access them anytime, anywhere, at no cost.
•
Amazon introduced Fire TV Stick, bringing the same experience customers love
about Amazon Fire TV — ease of use, great performance, and vast selection — to
a smaller and even more affordable device. Fire TV Stick plugs into the HDMI
port on an HDTV and provides instant access to movies, TV shows, music, photos,
apps, and games.
•
Amazon introduced Echo, a new category of device designed around voice
recognition. Echo is hands-free and always on — customers can ask it for
information, music, news, and weather from across the room and get results or
answers instantly. Echo uses far-field voice recognition with an advanced array
of seven microphones to clearly hear around the room, and has advanced audio
design that includes dual downward-firing speakers that produce 360˚
omni-directional, room-filling audio.
•
The critically-acclaimed Prime-exclusive series, Transparent, received two
Golden Globes. Transparent is the first series from a streaming video service
to win a Golden Globe for best series.
•
Amazon Studios announced it will begin to produce and acquire original movies
for theatrical release and early window distribution on Prime Instant Video.
Production will begin in 2015 with the goal of bringing a dozen original,
prestige movies to customers each year.
•
Amazon debuted its first pilot season of 2015, which is available exclusively
on Amazon Instant Video in the U.S., U.K., and Germany. The new pilots include
Cocked, Mad Dogs, The Man in the High Castle, Point of Honor, Down Dog, Salem
Rogers, and The New Yorker Presents, as well as six new kids pilots. All ten
episodes of the highly-anticipated dramatic comedy series Mozart in the Jungle
premiered on Prime Instant Video in the U.S., U.K., and Germany. In addition,
all ten episodes of the drama series, Bosch, will premiere in February on Prime
Instant Video in the U.S., U.K., and Germany.
•
Amazon Studios announced it will produce the first television series from
Oscar-winning director and producer Woody Allen, which will debut exclusively
on Prime Instant Video in the U.S., U.K., and Germany in 2015. Untitled Woody
Allen Project has received a full season order and will be written and directed
by Allen.
•
Amazon launched the Kindle Store in the Netherlands, offering over 3 million
titles in many languages, over 700,000 Kindle exclusives, and more than 20,000
titles in Dutch.
•
AmazonFresh expanded to Manhattan and Philadelphia. Prime members in eligible
zip codes can combine grocery and other shopping into one seamless experience.
Customers can order from over 500,000 items for same-day and early morning
delivery.
•
The number of Amazon sellers using Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) grew by more
than 65% year-over-year in 2014. In the fourth quarter, FBA units represented
more than 40% of total third-party units.
•
Amazon unveiled its 8th generation fulfillment center which utilizes robotics,
vision systems, and almost 20 years worth of software and mechanical
innovations to fulfill customer orders. During the holiday season, the
fulfillment network included more than 15,000 robots in 10 fulfillment centers
across the U.S.
•
Amazon.co.uk announced that Sunday deliveries have grown by more than 4x in the
last year as more customers across the U.K. discover the benefits of receiving
orders seven days a week. The increase in Sunday deliveries has been made
possible in large part due to the introduction of Amazon Logistics, a
technology and logistics platform that empowers independent local, regional,
and national delivery companies across the U.K. to deliver Amazon parcels to
customers seven days a week.
•
Amazon announced it will open a 46,000 square-foot fashion photography studio
in Shoreditch, London in 2015. The studio will be one of the largest of its
kind in Europe and will provide both on-model and off-model imaging for
Amazon’s rapidly growing European fashion business.
•
In 2014, the second year of its operation, Amazon.in emerged as India’s largest
online store. It launched 24 new departments, increasing selection to over 19
million products, and grew its seller base exponentially to more than 16,000
sellers.
•
Amazon launched Amazon Global Store on the China site, www.amazon.cn. The store
provides approximately 200,000 products selected from the Amazon U.S. website
based on the most popular Chinese customer demands. Chinese customers are now
able to enjoy the same quality product at the same price as U.S. customers,
while having a Chinese shopping experience, local customer service, and direct
shipment to their homes.
•
With over 515 significant service and feature releases in 2014 (up more than
80% year-over-year), and over one million active customers, Amazon Web Services
(AWS) continues to grow strongly, with usage growth close to 90% year-over-year
for the fourth quarter.
•
AWS announced that more than 13,500 attendees from 63 countries attended AWS
re:Invent 2014, its third annual customer and partner conference.
•
AWS announced Amazon Aurora, a MySQL-compatible database engine for Amazon
Relational Database Service that combines the speed and availability of
high-end commercial databases with the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of
open source databases. Amazon Aurora provides up to 5x better performance than
the typical MySQL database, availability as good or better than commercial
databases or high-end SANs, and superior scalability and security — all at
one-tenth the cost of high-end commercial database offerings.
•
AWS announced AWS Lambda, a compute service that runs developers’ code in
response to events and automatically manages the required compute resources,
making it easy to build and manage applications that respond quickly to new
information.
•
AWS announced three new services to make it even easier for enterprises to
maintain security, governance, and compliance of their resources in the AWS
cloud: AWS Key Management Service, AWS Config, and AWS Service Catalog.
•
AWS announced AWS CodeDeploy, a fully managed, high-scale deployment service
that lets developers quickly and simply automate the process of deploying and
updating applications on Amazon EC2.
•
AWS announced the Amazon EC2 Container Service, a highly scalable,
high-performance container management service that makes it easy to run and
manage distributed applications using containers on AWS.
•
AWS has teamed with Pattern Energy Group LP to support the construction and
operation of a 150 megawatt wind farm in Benton County, Indiana, called the
Amazon Wind Farm (Fowler Ridge). It is expected to generate approximately
500,000 megawatt hours of wind power annually that will be used to help power
both current and future AWS data centers.
•
AWS announced Amazon WorkMail, a cloud-based business email and calendaring
service with strong security controls and support for popular email clients.
Financial Guidance
The
following forward-looking statements reflect Amazon.com’s expectations as of
January 29, 2015, and are subject to substantial uncertainty. Our results are
inherently unpredictable and may be materially affected by many factors, such
as fluctuations in foreign exchange rates, changes in global economic
conditions and consumer spending, world events, the rate of growth of the
Internet and online commerce, and the various factors detailed below.
First Quarter 2015
Guidance
•
Net sales are expected to be between $20.9 billion and $22.9 billion, or to
grow between 6% and 16% compared with first quarter 2014.
•
Operating income (loss) is expected to be between $(450) million and $50
million, compared to $146 million in first quarter 2014.
•
This guidance includes approximately $450 million for stock-based compensation
and amortization of intangible assets, and it assumes, among other things, that
no additional business acquisitions, investments, restructurings, or legal
settlements are concluded and that there are no further revisions to
stock-based compensation estimates.
A
conference call will be webcast live today at 2 p.m. PT/5 p.m. ET, and will be
available for at least three months at www.amazon.com/ir. This call will
contain forward-looking statements and other material information regarding the
Company’s financial and operating results.
These
forward-looking statements are inherently difficult to predict. Actual results
could differ materially for a variety of reasons, including, in addition to the
factors discussed above, the amount that Amazon.com invests in new business
opportunities and the timing of those investments, the mix of products sold to
customers, the mix of net sales derived from products as compared with
services, the extent to which we owe income taxes, competition, management of
growth, potential fluctuations in operating results, international growth and
expansion, the outcomes of legal proceedings and claims, fulfillment,
sortation, delivery, and data center optimization, risks of inventory
management, seasonality, the degree to which the Company enters into,
maintains, and develops commercial agreements, acquisitions and strategic
transactions, payments risks, and risks of fulfillment throughput and
productivity. Other risks and uncertainties include, among others, risks
related to new products, services, and technologies, system interruptions,
government regulation and taxation, and fraud. In addition, the current global
economic climate amplifies many of these risks. More information about factors
that potentially could affect Amazon.com’s financial results is included in
Amazon.com’s filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”),
including its most recent Annual Report on Form 10-K and subsequent filings.
Our
investor relations website is www.amazon.com/ir and we encourage investors to
use it as a way of easily finding information about us. We promptly make
available on this website, free of charge, the reports that we file or furnish
with the SEC, corporate governance information (including our Code of Business
Conduct and Ethics), and select press releases and social media postings.
About Amazon
Amazon.com
opened on the World Wide Web in July 1995. The company is guided by four
principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for
invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking.
Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime,
Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire phone, Fire
tablets, and Fire TV are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon.
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