Without mentioning a single fact, Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) said Wednesday morning that the past weekend’s shopping was the best ever for its Kindle family of products. Fact-free announcements are standard procedure for Amazon.
According to the press announcement, customers purchased “more Kindle Fire tablets and Kindle e-readers than ever before. Additionally, Kindle Fire HDX 7″ and Kindle Fire HD were the best-selling items on Amazon.com this holiday shopping weekend.”
Of course Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) did not disclose how many iPads and iPad minis it sold over the weekend either. Research firm InfoScout, however, said the iPad mini was the top seller at Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (NYSE: WMT) on Black Friday and that the iPad Air was the best seller at Target Corp. (NYSE: TGT) stores. The $99 Kindle Fire was the third best-seller at Best Buy Co. Inc. (NYSE: BBY), behind even the iPad 2 at $299.
Now Amazon does get more e-commerce traffic, and sales of its Kindle products at its own website should be huge. And we already know that Amazon prices for market share, not profit, so the company’s claim to record sales is surely true.
As long as Amazon feels no pressure to release actual numbers, it won’t. And with CEO Jeff Bezos firmly in the driver’s seat and a stock price approaching $400 a share, it is pretty unlikely that an activist investor is going to come along and jar the numbers out of Amazon.
Still, it is interesting to see that the current quarter’s consensus estimate for Amazon’s earnings per share is $0.66, up more than three times from the fourth quarter a year ago. Revenues are estimated at $26.03 billion, another sharp jump from last year’s total of $21.27 billion. The company pays no dividend either.
Shares of Amazon were up about 0.6% in mid-morning trading Wednesday, at $386.91 in a 52-week range of $242.75 to $399.00.
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