CEO Jeff Bezos recently revealed that the company has now surpassed 100 million Prime members.
Advertisement
Hundreds of Amazon workers blew whistles and banged drums on Tuesday as they protested against working conditions in Germany where the megagroup’s founder Jeff Bezos was receiving a prize.
The Bezos-funded space exploration company Blue Origin is “the most important thing I’m doing”, said the chief executive upon receiving a business innovation award from German publishing house Axel Springer.
The North American segment could see a surge in coming quarters from another piece of Amazon’s business – its Prime subscription service.
In its quarterly earnings call Thursday, Amazon announced it was increasing the annual price from $99 per year to $119 starting May 11 for new members.
“There’s all kinds of new features that we’ve continually added to the Prime program”, Mr. Olsavsky said.
For the current quarter ending in July, Ellie Mae expects its per-share earnings to range from 38 to 43 cents on revenue of $122 million to $124 million.
Amazon’s results easily beat estimated earnings per share of $1.26 on revenue of revenue of $49.79 billion, based on a consensus of analysts polled by Thomson Reuters. “They need to find $25 billion-plus of topline growth every year to maintain their growth rate, and at some point that outstrips the speed of consumers” behavior change.
Amazon, founded 24 years ago as a online bookseller, has grown into a multi-billion-dollar tech juggernaut with a hand in number of industries, including groceries, private-label clothing and movie production. For second quarter sales, the analyst projects $52.30 billion from Amazon, with $0.92 billion in operating income and $1.12 in EPS against the Street’s $52.20 billion, $1.15 billion, and $1.46. Following the announcement the stock was up 7% at $1,628.00 in the after-hours session. Sales from Prime fees and other subscriptions grew 60 percent to $3.1 billion.
The estimate among analysts was that Amazon’s profit would shrink from the prior year.
Advertisement
Of course, last summer’s acquisition of Whole Foods also served to boost results this time around, while Amazon’s Amazon Web Services cloud computing platform is also growing quickly.
