So is this.
>New York, Sept. 20 (Bloomberg) -- A day after Amazon.com Inc.'s management met with Wall Street analysts, shareholders rushed to sell, while the analysts took a rosier view.
Twenty-four brokerages issued research notes today, and all left their earnings estimates on Amazon.com unchanged -- most with a ``buy'' rating.
``They're just saying they went to the meeting and didn't learn anything,'' said Chris Wiles, who manages $330 million at Rockhaven Asset Management in Pittsburgh. Wiles doesn't currently own Amazon shares.
Meantime, the No. 1 online retailer slid 3.25, or 8 percent, to 37.50 as investors fled after failing to get an answer to a question that has dogged the company since its initial stock sale in 1997: Will the company, which has lost $1.5 billion since it was founded six years ago, ever turn a profit?
That information was conspicuously absent from yesterday's meeting.
Amazon chairman and founder Jeffrey Bezos told 125 analysts and investors assembled at the University of Nevada's Lawler Events Center that ``this is the Kitty Hawk era of e-commerce. The best stuff hasn't even been invented yet.''
And while he said his company could average 50 percent cumulative annual sales growth over the next 15 years, neither Bezos nor other Amazon officials said when investors could expect that growth to yield a profit.
Amazon.com, which has dropped 51 percent this year, has no plans to announce when it might achieve profitability, said company spokesman Bill Curry.
``We would get back into the stock if we saw they could make money,'' Rockhaven's Wiles said. Amazon.com has through Christmas to prove that, he said.
Without any sense of when Amazon.com will turn a profit, there's no reason to buy the shares right now, Wiles said. If the company shows it can make money, it's going to 400, he added. If not, ``they're going to zero.'' So missing a $10 rise in the shares doesn't matter, Wiles said.
Sep/20/2000 17:27 ET |
