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Technology Stocks : Amazon.com, Inc. (AMZN) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Victor Lazlo who wrote (106460)	7/26/2000 12:02:00 AM
From: Glenn D. Rudolph	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 164684

From the Blodgett staff: • Amazon announced today that Joe Galli, president and COO is leaving the company for what they cited to be personal reasons. Galli will become CEO of VerticalNet. • We regard this as a loss for Amazon. We have a high regard for Joe Galli and believe that he brought a much needed set of skills to Amazon and has accomplished a lot in one year. However, Galli’s core competency is operational expertise and his skills are not irreplaceable. • We believe that the deep senior management left at Amazon is very capable of executing the plans that Galli set in place. • We do not expect to see significant change in the strategic direction of the company and we do not yet know if his position will be filled with a replacement. • As we have discussed in the past, we believe Amazon is in the middle of an awkward transition from a hyper-growth start-up to a long-term growth, Fortune 1000 scale, global company. • Our hope is that Galli’s departure is merely a short term bump in the road for Amazon. • Amazon will be reporting results tomorrow night after the close. We are looking for $585mm in revenue and EPS loss of ($0.33). We do not expect much upside to our estimates. • We do not see any near term catalysts for the stock but we expect the leading BLC e-commerce companies to move higher as we get closer to Q4. My comments: Paying Galli $6.2 million per year and he is not all that important? The analyst hopes this is just a bump in the road for Amazon. Are we cheerleading here or making an analysis? It is good the analyst is not expecting any upside surprised to their estimates. It would seem to me if they were, they should change the estimates to meet what they expect. Now more from ML: • Joe Galli, President, will leave AMZN to go to VERT. Galli was hired roughly a year ago to transform the company as he has an excellent reputation in operations. • We spoke to the company which stressed that it has a plan in place which it is comfortable with and will continue to execute. • This departure was not expected and, while this is not positive news for AMZN, we do not believe it will be detrimental and maintain our Buy rating. (H. Blodget) My comment: A "Plan in place." My gosh that is nice. I wonder what it is and if management intends to ever tell their shareholders what it is. The shareholders are the ones that have footed the bill for this firm since inception meaning paying every dollar management has taken out of the company not to mention the VCs, etc. I wonder what a firm valued in the billions would ne like with no plan. I am finding this funny<G>