Amazon announces 4th quarter sales

https://ir.aboutamazon.com/static-files/bf635f1d-f1d0-4cf3-b172-bb6ebdc6241b

by rising-sky • 7 years ago

47 47 7 years ago

ir.aboutamazon.com

rising-sky• 7 years ago

"Alexa was very busy during her holiday season. Echo Dot was the best-selling item across all products on Amazon globally, and customers purchased millions more devices from the Echo family compared to last year,” said Jeff Bezos, Amazon founder and CEO. “The number of research scientists working on Alexa has more than doubled in the past year, and the results of the team’s hard work are clear. In 2018, we improved Alexa’s ability to understand requests and answer questions by more than 20% through advances in machine learning, we added billions of facts making Alexa more knowledgeable than ever, developers doubled the number of Alexa skills to over 80,000, and customers spoke to Alexa tens of billions more times in 2018 compared to 2017"

wufufufu• 7 years ago

I have a HomePod and Echo Dot. I trust the HomePod more in terms of privacy, build quality, customer service, warranty, etc. The Echo Dot is way better at finding my voice and doing what I want it to do. The HomePod goes off randomly when the TV is on, and it costs 10x more.

quotha• 7 years ago

Maybe because IT'S LISTENING TO ALL OF YOUR CONVERSATIONS

borkt• 7 years ago

Do either of them actually provide any value (apart from homepod audio quality)? For the life of me I can't find a reason to have one of these in my house and I really am not concerned about the privacy issues.

DVassallo2• 7 years ago

$10B in net income in 2018. I guess it’s not an investor-run charity for consumers anymore [1].

[1] https://slate.com/business/2013/01/amazon-q4-profits-fall-45...

DVassallo2• 7 years ago

Also intesting: AMZN’s net income was 4.3% of sales. For AMZN to reach AAPL’s valuation of 13.5 P/E, AMZN would need to do $1.5 trillion in sales.

But if it continues to grow sales at 31%, it should get there by 2025.

why_only_15• 7 years ago

That's a crazy pair of facts. Interesting to compare Walmart on this front - its revenue is $500B with growth at 2%, whereas Amazon has sales on the same order of magnitude but growth an order of magnitude higher. I wonder how long this rate of growth is sustainable, both for Amazon and the rest of FAANG. Have there ever been companies this big growing this fast?

partingshots• 7 years ago

dang, if you read this, I think you should seriously consider banning earnings report articles. They always come and clutter up the feed, hiding the substantive information and technical news I come to Hacker News specifically for.

Because I feel like if I really wanted a feed of quarterly earnings, I’d be on Google Finance or something, not HN. The name is Hacker News, or has that been forgotten at this point?

seizethecheese2• 7 years ago

Personally, these are some of my favorite threads.

seizethecheese2• 7 years ago

These happen to be some of my favorite threads.

YCombinator is a technology business accelerator after all, so there's a lot of interest in this stuff here.

nathanaldensr• 7 years ago

HN has, since the 2016 Presidential election, become a dumping ground for low-quality pieces from various popular media outlets (you know the ones I'm talking about), as well as all kinds of generally-interesting-but-not-related-to-tech-in-any-way stories. My guess is that since the very idea of a "startup" has waned in recent years, the readership has shifted from a technical one to a political one. There isn't much any one of us can do to correct this. The people who want this kind of content apparently now outnumber folks like us who wish that content would stay on Reddit.

dang• 7 years ago

People have been saying that for a long time now:

2008: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=278434 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=348994 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=243561

2010: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1934367 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1542380

2013: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6157485

There has always been a mix of general-interest and technical articles on HN, and a certain portion of politics. I wrote more about this if anyone wants more:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18511923

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869

outworlder3• 7 years ago

I think you should seriously consider banning earnings report articles. They always come and clutter up the feed, hiding the substantive information and technical news I come to Hacker News specifically for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead. If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did.

kilo_bravo_3• 7 years ago

They earned it.

Polar vortex is here. I'm going to be outside at a customer site working on some equipment.

Need a hat. Something thick and furry.

We have an actual "indie millinery shop" in my city. Yay! Support your local merchant!

No winter hats. If I wanted a $399 Super Duper Hats Albino Fedora 100% rabbit fur felt fedora I could get it in an hour but no winter hats.

So then I went to Bass Pro, JCPenney, Sears, Nordstrom, Dick's, Macy's, Eddie Bauer, Burlington, Target, and finally REI.

Only a handful of them had any winter hats and none of them had any men's adult-sized hats in stock. Not even a beanie.

On Tuesday, January 29th at 6:57pm I left REI after having wasted over three hours going to 11 retailers and I got into my car. While in the REI parking lot I ordered a winter hat and gloves from Amazon for $45 with Prime next day delivery.

They were delivered at 3:03pm the next day. Before the sub-zero temperatures.

This keeps happening over and over again, I stopped being a "grazing" shopper over a decade ago and only buy specific items after research.

No retailers seem to be adapting, just racing to the bottom.

Burlington looked like a nightmarish blindingly brightly-lit hellscape with garbage that had already failed to sell at Target being strewn about as old ladies picked through it.

As far as I'm concerned, brick and mortar is dead.

edit: to be fair, if I wanted a SWAT-team/bank robber balaclava that covered my entire face, the sporting goods stores had me covered. I prefer that people I'm interacting with at work see my face.

WrtCdEvrydy• 7 years ago

brick and mortar is dead.

Honestly, partnering with Amazon and basically giving you a product instantly would make brick and mortar thrive.

You want to buy this thing? If it's available at Best Buy, you can pick up within minutes at the counter and Amazon can ship a replacement to Best Buy in the next few days.

sl1ck731• 7 years ago

I wonder of retailers getting slightly different model numbers has anything to do with preventing this from ever being possible. I know they do it on black Friday to avoid price matching but I seem to run across wierd almost-exactly-the-same electronics at the local electronic stores more often than just black Friday.

nightski• 7 years ago

I can already do this with Best Buy, no Amazon necessary.

heavyset_go• 7 years ago

I already do this with Best Buy, with the added benefit of knowing that the product I'm buying isn't a cheap ripoff that was flipped from Alibaba.com, but fulfilled by Amazon.com.

petra• 7 years ago

Best buy currently buys stuff at wholesale prices.

Amazon sells at retail prices.

Not sure they can meet in the middle economically.

Especially with Amazon closing in on stores, with in city distribution centers and pick up lockers.

ip26• 7 years ago

FWIW REI will let you browse ahead of time by what's in stock at your local store, and can often get an item for pickup if they don't have it at your local location in a day or two for free.

(Granted, other choices might ship a bit faster or cost a bit less, but that's never been REI's niche)

kregasaurusrex• 7 years ago

I ran into a similar case with umbrellas- there weren't any local stores selling them on the day before a major rainstorm that ended up causing a significant amount of flooding around the state. Instead I'd decided to pay the premium and pick a reasonably sturdy one from Amazon with next-day pickup.

jbob2000• 7 years ago

1000x this! I needed to buy golf balls for a Christmas gift. I went to 4 sports stores; “sorry we only sell hockey stuff”, “sorry that’s not in season right now”, “sorry we don’t sell golf stuff”, “umm let me check in the back... sorry not in stock”.

This is in a wealthy suburb where many homes back on to golf courses. So yep, I had to order them off Amazon.

rthomas6• 7 years ago

Walmart is adapting fairly well. It's just that they have a stigma among wealthier folks, so we don't know about it. Walmart's online selection is often competitive with Amazon, or even cheaper. They have free 2 day shipping, you can ship to the stores, and Walmart is very good at having the right things in stock. I bet they would have had hats if you checked there.

Latteland• 7 years ago

Among Walmart's many stigmas is that they are associated with questionable conservative political causes, carried out now by the current generations that inherited the founder's money.

Paying millions to name a school arena after your daughter who was attending that school, then having no shame when it turns out said daughter was paying her roommate to do her school work - they did that. Bezos' kids are too young to have yet had their chance. I'm from the state where discount city was founded, I've seen this and much more. Before amazon, walmart was the mighty killer or all other retail. Now amazon is mightier.

kgwgk• 7 years ago

I noticed that margins are down compared to the previous quarter in the three segments (US, International, AWS). Maybe there is some seasonal explanation for that, but in 2017 margins improved in the three segments.

heurist• 7 years ago

No mention of Audible?

hbosch• 7 years ago

I don’t think Audible is a significant portion of Amazon revenue.

Amazon announces 4th quarter sales

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