"Amazon's pro forma buzz
Investors balk at annual meeting prognostications
By Shawn Langlois, CBS.MarketWatch.com
Last Update: 2:15 PM ET June 6, 2001
SAN FRANCISCO (CBS.MW) -- "The Little Black Book of Business Words" defines "pro forma" as "a financial statement in which some or all of the information is estimated or based on a series of assumptions."
Or, as one of our esteemed editors succinctly put it, "earnings before the bad stuff."
Then again, cyber-lurkers have a bevy of their own definitions, particularly when it comes to Amazon.com (AMZN: news, msgs, alerts) and the "pro forma" baton-twirler himself, CEO Jeff Bezos.
For instance, Raging Bull's AlwaysWinning might not be freelancing for Merriam-Webster anytime soon, but he succeeded in getting his point across: "This is where the ingenious concept of pro-forma profit comes in very handy: You take revenue, take the costs, and you keep excluding costs in your pro forma numbers until you are left with a pro forma profit. As long as you are sure that you will have more than $0 revenues, you can guarantee pro-forma profit."
Oh, but that was just the beginning.
The bearish Amazon flood raged out of control shortly after CFO Warren Jenson opened up his commentary at the annual meeting with, "we will be well positioned for pro forma operating profitability for the year 2002," complete with the hauntingly familiar Amazonian mantra, "but there are no guarantees."
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