Amazon pleased investors Thursday, reporting first-quarter earnings that beat Wall Street expectations. Shares were up 8 percent in after-hours trading.
Net income fell 35 percent to $ 130 million, or $ 0.28 per share. Amazon reported $ 13.19 billion in revenue, up 34 percent over last year and beating estimates of $ 12.9 billion. Operating income was $ 192 million, down 40.4 percent over last year — implying a profit margin of about 1.5 percent, roughly neutral compared to investor expectations.
In the release, CEO Jeff Bezos touted the “more than 130,000 new, in-copyright books that are exclusive to the Kindle Store,” free to Amazon Prime members through the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library. Seemingly referencing “traditional” libraries, he said, “we have an inexhaustible supply of each title so you never have to wait in a queue for the book you want.”
The company reports that “Kindle Fire remains the #1 bestselling, most gifted, and most wished for product across the millions of items available on Amazon.com since launch” and says “in the first quarter, 9 out of 10 of the top sellers on Amazon.com were digital products — Kindle, Kindle books, movies, music and apps.” Kindle is “the bestselling e-reader in the world, by far,” Bezos said. And the Kindle for iPad app is “the #5 free iPad app of all time and the #1 free books app on iPad.”
Worldwide media sales rose 19 percent to $ 4.71 billion, while worldwide electronics and other general merchandise sales grew 43 percent to $ 7.97 billion. Investors had been waiting to see Amazon’s electronics sales in light of Apple’s very strong earnings report released earlier this week.
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