Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) reported its third quarter earnings after the close on Thursday. The online retailer of anything and everything has managed to get away with reporting margins which are so thin that they are barely visible for quite some time now, and the company is even losing money. Earnings came in at a loss with -$0.09 EPS and sales of $17.09 billion. The Amazon consensus estimates from Thomson Reuters were -$0.09 EPS and $16.77 billion in revenue.
For the coming quarter, the all important holiday quarter, Bezos is signaling sales of $23.5 billion to $26.5 billion versus estimates of about $25.9 billion. Jeff Bezos and friends are also signaling that the holiday quarter will come with an operating gain or loss of -$500 million to a positive $500 million.
To show just how razor-thin operating margins have been, they were a mere 0.9% in the third quarter. Still, Jeff Bezos is building a retail empire for the year 2016 or maybe even 2020. Shareholders have been bidding Amazon up almost endlessly. This stock closed up 1.6% at $332.21 against a prior all-time high of $337.11, but shares are indicated up 5% at $348.30 in the after-hours reaction.
We could continue to show how things are progressing with thin margins or other operating concerns, but the truth is that nobody cares about that. They care about the 2016 or 2020 plan. Margins be damned!
Amazon was already worth $151 billion as of the close. It is worth even more now. Jeff Bezos was last shown to have almost 86 million shares. That is worth almost $30 billion on paper if the after-hours new highs can hold up beyond Thursday.
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