What to Expect From Amazon Earnings

Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) is scheduled to release its first-quarter financial results after the markets close on Thursday. The consensus estimates from Thomson Reuters are calling for $0.58 in earnings per share (EPS) on $27.98 billion in revenue. In the same period of last year, it posted a net loss of $0.12 per share on $22.72 billion in revenue.

This company is the absolute leader in online retail, as well as a dominant player in the cloud storage business, but it missed estimates badly and got hit hard in January. Amazon serves consumers through retail websites, which primarily include merchandise and content purchased for resale from vendors and those offered by third-party sellers. In addition, the company serves developers and enterprises through Amazon Web Services (AWS), which provides compute, storage, database, analytics, applications and deployment services that enable virtually various businesses.

AWS is the undisputed leader in the cloud now, and Merrill Lynch sees the company expanding and moving up the enterprise information value chain and addressing a larger total available market. The company has had numerous recent product announcements, including Aurora for relational database engine, Quicksight for business intelligence and AWS Database Migration Support Service.

Some analysts also think that AWS will continue to be a huge driver of Amazon’s operating profit growth, growing an astonishing 55% year over year in 2016 to $12.2 billion. In the sum-of-the-parts analysis, AWS is a staggering $202 per share, over a third of the current dollar amount. Wedbush expects the company to beat current estimates but cautions it could announce an earnings reset for 2016 and 2017.
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A few analysts weighed in on Amazon recently:

• Nomura has a Buy rating with a $750 price target.
• Cantor Fitzgerald reiterated a Buy rating with a $750 price target.
• Goldman Sachs reiterated a Buy rating with a $720 price target.
• SunTrust reiterated a Hold rating and raised its price target to $625 from $600.
• Wedbush reiterated an Outperform rating with a $700 price target.
• Credit Suisse also reiterated an Outperform rating with a $700 price target.

So far in 2016, Amazon has underperformed the broad markets, with the stock down about 10%. However, over the past 52 weeks the stock is actually up over 40%.

Shares of Amazon were trading up 2.5% at $621.46 on Thursday, with a consensus analyst price target of $740.49 and a 52-week trading range of $414.55 to $696.44.

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