Operationally, they did quite well during the quarter, ... The real reason for [the higher losses] is their higher costs for markdowns on the consumer side. That's their attempt to err on the side of service. |
Over the past two months, we have lost some confidence in the company's ability to generate the growth necessary to meet our estimates. |
She's not the first very strong executive to leave a dot.com that's had its stock go down. |
The cash position doesn't look that bad, but it all depends on the burn rate going forward. |
The company has tried to grow as fast as it can, tried to do a lot of things at the same time. |
The one thing it said was under no circumstance would any government agency be allowed to keep the fingerprints on file, |
The quarter was no surprise, but the future guidance was very favorable. The forecast of single-digit losses is a sea change for Amazon. We believe this is a key inflection point for the stock and that it will take off from here. |
This is actually a really big deal because in Amazon's earnings, about $24 million in gross profit comes from the commerce network, |
This is actually a really big deal because in Amazon's earnings, about $24 million in gross profit comes from the commerce network. |
We think they will, but the question for the stock is: in the year 2005, do they do $8 billion in sales or do they do $20 billion in sales? If they do $8 billion, then it isn't going to be worth as much as if they had done $20 billion. |
What happened is that the bar ran out of liquor -- they took away the punch bowl. |
What that means is that when everything is all said and done, this thing is going to be a much smaller business than people thought. We're not saying none of it [the model] works; we're saying it's only going to work for a small group of customers, relative to what people thought. |
What we think the numbers are saying is that the frequency and retention of existing customers is not anywhere near where it needs to be for the model to work in our opinion. |
Why are we downgrading the stock now? Mainly because of our belief that sales may not be advancing at the rate that we had previously anticipated and also because of the impending departure of Galli. |
Worldwide Internet retail sales were almost $23 billion in 1999 and we expect that to double in 2000. Street estimates for worldwide sales in 2002 are approximately $105 billion, with $65 billion of that in the U.S. This implies an annual growth rate of 80 percent worldwide. |