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

To: H James Morris who wrote (108515)	9/18/2000 10:44:41 AM
From: Glenn D. Rudolph	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 164684

September 11, 2000 Personalized E-Mail ------------------------------------------------------------------------ The Numbers Game Reporting of pro forma earnings is rising, and so is the debate about it By BILL ALPERT The headline of Amazon.com's June earnings release bragged of "pro forma" operating profits on sales of books and records. Only investors who delved deeply into the financials learned that the online retailer's actual bottom line was a net loss of $317 million, or 91 cents per share. Pro forma earnings used to be a rare sighting, appearing on such extraordinary occasions as a merger or a corporate restructuring. The term -- which Latin lovers will recognize as meaning "according to form" -- once denoted a hypothetical presentation to show what earnings might've been, had some extraordinary event occurred a year earlier. In Wall Street English, the term pro forma earnings now seems to mean earnings. That is, earnings after each company excludes its idiosyncratic choice of such expenses as amortization, depreciation, payroll taxes and investment results. The reporting of pro forma profits has proliferated at dozens of firms. Cisco Systems, Disney Internet Group and Yahoo feature them in every earnings release. At Amazon, the pro forma numbers get bigger play than the actual figures defined by generally accepted accounting principles -- known in accountant's English as GAAP. interactive.wsj.com@1.cgi?id=SB968458984440304480.djm&template=personalized-email.tmpl Please read the rest. It is good.