Amazon Muted Despite Solid Q1 Earnings Beat

Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN | AMZN Price Prediction) reported second-quarter financial results after markets closed Thursday. The company posted $6.04 in earnings per share (EPS) on $72.4 billion in revenue, which compares with consensus estimates from Thomson Reuters that called for $5.67 in EPS on $71.87 billion in revenue. The same period of last year reportedly had $3.75 in EPS on $60.45 billion in revenue.

During the most recent quarter, Amazon Web Services (AWS) revenues increased 45% to $7.43 billion, up from $5.11 billion in the same period last year, with operating income of $2.18 billion.

In terms of its other segments Amazon reported:

• North American net sales increased 18% to $44.12 billion, with operating income of $2.25 billion.
• International sales increased 15% to $20.83 billion, with an operating loss of $642 million.

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As for guidance, the company expects to see net sales in the range of $56 billion to $60 billion, with operating income of $2.3 billion to $3.3 billion, in the first quarter. The consensus estimates call for $4.44 in EPS on $60.96 billion in revenue for the quarter.

Jeff Bezos, Amazon founder and CEO, commented:

Alexa was very busy during her holiday season. Echo Dot was the best-selling item across all products on Amazon globally, and customers purchased millions more devices from the Echo family compared to last year. The number of research scientists working on Alexa has more than doubled in the past year, and the results of the team’s hard work are clear. In 2018, we improved Alexa’s ability to understand requests and answer questions by more than 20% through advances in machine learning, we added billions of facts making Alexa more knowledgeable than ever, developers doubled the number of Alexa skills to over 80,000, and customers spoke to Alexa tens of billions more times in 2018 compared to 2017. We’re energized by and grateful for the response, and you can count on us to keep working hard to bring even more invention to customers.

Shares of Amazon closed Thursday at $1,718.73, with a consensus analyst price target of $2,138.39 and a 52-week range of $1,265.93 to $2,050.50. Following the announcement, the stock was initially down about 1% at $1,694.00 in the after-hours session.

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