Can Amazon Have A $25 Billion Holiday Quarter?

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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What would a huge holiday quarter look like for Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN)? Revenue of $25 billion. At that level Amazon would prove that its sales can continue to grow at an unexpectedly rapid pace, and that it is stealing revenue from other retailers–not just in the U.S. but around the world.

In the last quarter, Amazon’s revenue rose 22% to $17.09 billion. Its forecast for the holiday season?

Net sales are expected to be between $23.5 billion and $26.5 billion, or to grow between 10% and 25% compared with fourth quarter 2012.

At that level, Amazon’s sale for the quarter would probably pass Target’s (NYSE: TGT), which has 1,800 stores in the U.S., and is considered the second largest bricks-and-mortar retailer in the country.

Amazon has decided to do rapid fire promotions to draw consumers from the Thanksgiving and Black Friday sales of its competition. But, the core of its holiday success will fall on Cyber Monday, the date on which online sales generally peak during the holiday season. Amazon has already started to use the leverage that comes with having over 100 million monthly visitors, via promotions which could only work online. At the heart of that is a rotation of product sales which changes every ten minutes:

Starting at midnight on Sunday, Dec. 1, Amazon.com will open its Cyber Monday Deals Store with new deals as often as every ten minutes, including 50% off select top toys and 50% off a 46-inch Samsung LED HDTV. Shoppers can find seven days of savings this year filled with hundreds of deals each day including items eligible for Free Shipping and Prime Free Two-Day Shipping.

Amazon’s second large advantage is the Kindle, as it has been for several years. The popular DX model is being pushed via a heavily advertised discount–its price has been dropped from $239 to $169. The Kindle remains the front line product in Amazon’s attempt to corner the market on e-books and take streaming media customers away from its competition–mainly Netflix (NASDAQ: NFLX).

A $25 billion quarter? Happy holidays at Amazon.

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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