Skeeter Bug, Article...Amazon.com Beats Wall Street By 7 Cents...
(04/27/98; 7:31 p.m. ET)
By Gabrielle Jonas, TechInvestor
Monday was a busy day for bookseller Amazon.com, which announced after market close it beat Wall Street expectations for its first quarter, and has agreed to acquire three European Internet companies.
There was another surprise for Amazon.com investors -- a two-for-one stock split. Shares of Amazon.com [AMZN] closed down 2 1/8 to 82 3/4 in a rough day on the stock market.
The Seattle-based book retailer reported a net loss of $9.3 million, or 40 cents per share. According to First Call estimates, analysts were expecting a loss of 47 cents per share. In the comparable quarter last year, the company showed a net loss of $3 million, or 16 cents per share.
Revenue was $87.4 million, compared to $16 million in the same quarter last year.
At the end of the first quarter, Amazon.com had about 2.3 million customer accounts, an increase of 50 percent sequentially, and 564 percent higher than the comparable quarter a year ago. Repeat customer orders represented more than 60 percent of total orders the first quarter, Amazon.com said.
"It took us 27 months to serve our first million customers, and less than six months to serve our second million," said Jeff Bezos, Amazon's president and CEO, in a statement. The company's revenue growth, he said, has made Amazon.com the third-largest bookseller in the United States, online or offline.
Some accomplishments during the quarter, the company said, included the launching in February of Amazon.com Advantage, meant to increase the visibility and sales of titles from independent publishers and authors. In March, Amazon.com launched Amazon.com Kids, a site for children and young adults with a catalog of about 100,000 books.
Also Monday, Amazon.com said it acquired three Internet retailers: Bookpages Limited, Telebook, and Internet Movie Database. The latter is a "key underpinning for Amazon.com's eventual entry into online video sales," the company said.
Amazon.com will take a charge of about $55 million in connection with the three cash-and-stock acquisitions; the company expects to issue more than half a million shares of common stock to pay for them.
Bookpages, an online bookstore based in the United Kingdom, has a catalog of about 1.2 million books. Its counterpart in Germany, Telebook, has nearly 400,000 German titles. Internet Movie Database is a repository for movie and television information.
"We are committed to moving quickly to solidify and extend our current market leadership position in books, while pursuing these new opportunities," Bezos said. "This will require aggressive future investment in building our business and brand, expanding our product offerings, launching international operations, and integrating our recent acquisitions."
Amazon.com also announced a two-for-one split of its common stock, payable on June 1. Shareholders will receive an additional share of common stock for every share held on May 20.
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