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

To: hal jordan who wrote (2730)	4/2/1998 6:52:00 PM
From: Glenn D. Rudolph	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 164684

4/2/98 Wall St. J. Eur. 12 1998 WL-WSJE 3514089 The Wall Street Journal Europe Copyright (c) 1998, Dow Jones & Company, Inc. Thursday, April 2, 1998 Media & Marketing Amazon Expects More Losses SAN FRANCISCO -- Amazon.com Inc.'s annual report indicates the on-line bookseller expects to continue to report losses in the near future and to invest heavily in promoting its service. The report, filed earlier this week with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, didn't come as a surprise to analysts, who have become accustomed to warnings from Amazon executives that hefty spending on product development and marketing are necessary for the company to remain a leading cyber-retailer. In the SEC filing, Amazon said it "believes that it will continue to incur substantial operating losses for the foreseeable future and that the rate at which such losses will be incurred may increase significantly from current levels." "I didn't see anything in the rhetoric that was different from what they've been saying all along," Deutsche Morgan Grenfell Inc. analyst Lise Buyer said of the annual report. Still, the report wasn't without some interesting tidbits. For one, Amazon said competition in the electronic-commerce marketplace is intensifying, and it singled out the threat from "shopping agents" that will permit customers to compare Amazon's price with those of products on other sites. Ms. Buyer said that was a veiled reference to a service being developed by Cendant Corp., which sells books and music over the Internet. But she added that the agent service, which will monitor prices on other sites, then match or undercut the lowest among them, will charge a membership fee, making its cost reductions somewhat less of a steal than at first appearance. "You have to buy a lot of books to make it worth it," she said. Cendant is the franchising and marketing juggernaut formed in December from the megamerger of HFS Inc. and CUC International Inc. A spokeswoman for that company couldn't be reached for comment. Amazon's shares were 3.3% higher late Wednesday in New York, trading at $88.375, up $2.8437 from $85.5313 Tuesday on the Nasdaq Stock Market.