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

To: tonyt who wrote (10373)	7/14/1998 11:01:00 PM
From: c.r. earle	Respond to of 164684

tonyt, And the whisper on Yahoo was that they would post a loss rather than beat the estimates of a profit. Which is what they did.

To: tonyt who wrote (10373)	7/15/1998 6:10:00 AM
From: John May	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 164684

AMZN won't miss unless there's something extraordinary - maybe an acquisition or non-recurring start-up charges associated with opening the music store. Analysts are forecasting AMZN to achieve $350 million in sales in 1998. Even the Time Magazine article said, "sales that may reach $350 million this year." This is way too low. AMZN's 1Q98 revenues were $87.4 million. For them to do no better than $350 million in all of '98, their quarter-to-quarter growth would have to stop. This is not going to happen. 1Q98 revenues were 32.4% higher than 4Q97 which pits the year's worst quarter against the year's biggest. All you have to do to be certain of strong growth for Amazon this quarter is look at Yahoo!'s 2nd quarter report. The traffic was there; Yahoo!'s page views grew 21% for the quarter. AMZN sales for '98 will approach $450 million, not $350 million. They could even do $1 billion in 1999, instead of Y2K which has been predicted. The revenue numbers being predicted are too conservative, not only for Amazon, but for e-commerce as a whole. AMZN's 2Q98 revenues could easily top $100 million ($100 million would be only half the growth rate of 1Q98). For them to miss their loss number, their margins would have to plummet, and their expenses would have to soar in an extraordinary fashion. This hasn't been characteristic of their past trends which have been very predictable, in fact gross margin as a percent of sales grew at a healthy clip in the first quarter, jumping from 19.5% to 22.1%.