PARIS, FRANCE – SEP 28, 2018- Directly above view of New Amazon Cardboard box against yellow … [+]
In an otherwise relatively quiet week for the retail giant, Amazon had killer earnings this week. Shipping costs jumped 43% yoy but that’s the cost of getting you the right colour yellow scrunchy in 24-hours. In pretty much every other category that counts, Amazon knocked it out of the part and then got the ball and threw it further. The gains were, as Bloomberg pointed out, worth more than UPS’s entire market cap. Amazon is now publicly confirming there are more than 150 million Amazon Prime members globally. Bezos is now worth about $130 billion (he owns 12 percent of Amazon’s stock). The bigger picture, Amazon’s growth howls – while growth is decelerating – are being shown to be wrong and risks are paying off.
Amazon.com’s earnings rally has added more than $110 billion to the e-commerce giant’s market value in extended trading Thursday. By comparison, United Parcel Service’s entire market capitalization was less than $93 billion at the close. At one point, Amazon’s climb even rivaled IBM’s total market value, before the company known as Big Blue announced a new chief executive, producing its own post-market rally.
In more terrifying news, Amazon says it got 1,841 subpoenas, 440 search warrants, and 114 other court orders for user data in H2 2019, down 4% from H1. So, while going in the wrong direction, at least some people are taking notes even if it’s not Wall Street. Meanwhile, hundreds of employees protested about the results.
It’s a rarely seen decline in the number of demands received by a tech company during a year where almost every other tech giant — including Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Twitter — all saw an increase in the number of demands they receive. Only Apple reported a decline in the number of demands it received. … Amazon’s biannual transparency report is one of the lightest reads of any company’s figures across the tech industry. We previously reported on how Amazon’s transparency reports have purposefully become more vague over the years rather than clearer — bucking the industry trend. At just three pages, the company spends most of it explaining how it responds to each kind of legal demand rather than expanding on the numbers themselves.
Amazon’s sticky lasso aka Amazon Prime hit a milestone this week and Bezos let the world know. +150 million paying Prime Members now exist and they don’t seem too sad to be paying for the privilege. Amazon’s future plans to snare more people into this retention strategy look set to include content, shipping and more shipping. Geekwire has more details.
The milestone comes less than two years after the company disclosed the number of Prime members for the first time, saying in April 2018 that it had reached 100 million Prime members globally. It comes less than a year after Amazon started making one-day delivery the standard for free Prime delivery, shifting from two-day delivery previously. On a conference call with reporters, Amazon chief financial officer Brian Olsavsky said the shift to one-day shipping accelerated the increase in memberships “a bit,” but he said the growth is primarily the result of the company’s longstanding efforts to add benefits beyond free shipping. Amazon CFO Brian Olsavsky “That is what we’re seeing — it’s not anything sudden, but the progress on a long-term strategy of ours,” Olsavsky said.
