Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) has managed to be a thorn in the side of retail America. Now its fourth-quarter earnings report may have some things left to be desired. Amazon said that net sales rose 22% to $35.7 billion in the fourth quarter and net income was $482 million, or $1.00 per diluted share, and operating income increased 88% to $1.1 billion.
Thomson/First Call had the consensus estimates set at $35.93 billion in revenue and $1.56 in earnings per share. These also compared to numbers from a year ago of $29.3 billion in sales and operating income of $591 million.
The Amazon report did say that there was a $1.2 billion unfavorable impact from year-over-year changes in foreign exchange rates throughout the quarter.
Amazon’s guidance for the coming quarter was for net sales of between $26.5 billion and $29.0 billion, versus the Thomson/First Call number of $27.65 billion. Amazon guided the first-quarter operating income between a wide range of $100 million to $700 million, versus $255 million in the first quarter 2015.
Amazon also ended the year 2015 with some $15.89 billion in cash and cash equivalents, up from $14.557 billion a year earlier. In the past three months, Amazon’s net product sales were $26.618 billion, versus $23.102 billion a year earlier, and its net service sales rose to $9.129 billion from $6.226 billion a year ago.
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Net Amazon Web Services sales were $2.405 billion (with $687 million in operating income) in the fourth quarter, up from $1.42 billion (and $240 million in operating income) a year earlier. Its international sales were $11.841 billion in the fourth quarter, versus $10.575 billion a year ago.
Operating margin as a percentage of worldwide sales was 2.0% in the fourth quarter, versus 1.1% a year earlier.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos said:
Twenty years ago, I was driving the packages to the post office myself and hoping we might one day afford a forklift. This year, we pass $100 billion in annual sales and serve 300 million customers. And still, measured by the dynamism we see everywhere in the marketplace and by the ever-expanding opportunities we see to invent on behalf of customers, it feels every bit like Day 1.
Investors have decided to sell aggressively as their initial reaction. Amazon shares closed up 8.9% at $635.35 ahead of earnings, but the after-hours reaction was down 13% or so around $548.00. Amazon has a consensus analyst price target of $748.67 and a 52-week range of $299.33 to $696.44.
Imagine pressuring all of America’s retail segment and then not making a killing off of it.
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