Amazon, the online retailer, underlined its ability to thrive amid the global consumer slump on Thursday, announcing an 18 per cent increase in first-quarter revenues to $4.89bn, and a 24 per cent increase in earnings to $177m.
Excluding the impact of the stronger dollar on the overseas businesses, which account for almost half of its sales, Amazon’s net sales would have grown 25 per cent against the same period last year.
The strong quarter, which delivered earnings per share of 41 cents, beat Wall Street’s expectations and was at the high end of the company’s own forecasts, and continued the strong growth seen in the preceding holiday quarter.
Amazon’s shares, which have almost doubled since early December last year, gained more than 2 per cent in after-hours trading to $82.68.
The company’s robust performance is being sustained by its ability to offer prices on goods that compete with conventional discount retailers, combined with free shipping, and the comparatively prosperous demographics of online customers.
Amazon is also continuing to expand its sales range, recently launching a stand-alone shoe and accessory site in Japan, called javari.com, which is built on the architecture of its US Endless.com site.
It has launched digital music downloads on its German site and launched an online video game trade-in service.
The retailer soundly outperformed leading bricks and mortar rivals, while its growth in North America – up 21 per cent – was roughly twice most estimates of overall US online retail growth. International sales rose 15 per cent to $2.3bn, but increased 29 per cent on a constant currency basis.
The quarter also saw a dramatic 38 per cent increase in Amazon’s sales of non-media products such as electronics, clothing and food, which now account for 42 per cent of worldwide net sales, compared with 36 per cent last year.
Jeff Bezos, chief executive, highlighted the performance of the Kindle electronic bookreader, whose second version the company introduced this spring, saying sales “have exceeded our most optimistic expectations”, but gave no further details.
Tom Szkutak, chief financial officer, said that Amazon’s cloud computing web services business was gaining corporate clients and hedge funds. The company is also starting to market its web services to state and federal government clients.
For the second quarter, the company said it expected net sales to grow by 6-17 per cent to $4.3bn-$4.75bn. It forecast a decline in operating income of $110m-$190m compared with last year.
[the article was originally published at http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/8463ea90-3046-11de-88e3-00144feabdc0.html]
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment