What Happened to Amazon’s Holiday Results?

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Jan 14, 6:36AM EST

Follow 24/7 Wall St. on Google

This post may contain links from our sponsors and affiliates, and Flywheel Publishing may receive compensation for actions taken through them.

Most of the nation’s largest retailers have announced the results of holiday sales. A very few companies disclosed positive numbers. Many have not. The most worrisome data were from the weakest retailers — J.C. Penney Co. Inc. (NYSE: JCP) and Sears Holdings Corp. (NASDAQ: SHLD) — the survival of which have been called into question. Notably, among the retailers that have not said a thing about how well they did in the past two months is Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN). Although the e-commerce firm rarely gives out exact numbers, its management does like to brag about impressive progress. Maybe Amazon did less well than generally expected.

The past two official announcements from Amazon were made nearly a week ago. One was that it will be streaming the Veronica Mars TV series. The other was that its Marketplace Sellers had posted a record year. These “sellers” are among the two million or more companies that use Amazon.com as their conduit to people who buy goods and services online.

The most recent statement Amazon made about its own progress was on the day after Christmas:

Amazon today announced a record-setting holiday season for Amazon Prime, the annual membership program offering unlimited Free Two-Day Shipping on millions of items. More than one million customers around the world became new Prime members in the third week of December. On Amazon’s peak shipping day, more Prime items were shipped worldwide than ever before.

At the same time, Amazon hinted that its own sales had gone well during the holiday season. However, the hint was not strong enough for Amazon watchers to draw anything specific.

What outsiders do know about Amazon is that its goals for the holiday quarter were extremely ambitious. On October 24, Amazon reported sales had risen 24% in its most recent quarter to $17.09 billion. Its forecast for the coming holiday period:

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.

If Amazon does not reach the high end of that range, Wall Street will be terribly disappointed. Amazon’s shares have traded based on optimism, and they are up more than 40% from a year ago.

Amazon continues to keep its results from the holidays a secret, and that is almost certainly not a good thing.

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.