One of the biggest online retailer Amazon.com is exceeding their own expectations by passing its estimated sales for the first-quarter.
Bloomberg analysts projected a $22.4 billion in sales for the company. The company announced Thursday April 23rd of a 15 percent jump to $22.7 billion.
Amazon is reported to be the largest cloud-computing service seller with their Web Services saying their revenue increased by 49 percent to $1.57 billion.
More focus is being put into the companies biggest revenue outlet. Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos said money and focus is being put into new warehouses and data centers.
He also wants to add media content for Amazon Prime members to attract more members. Tom Szkutak the chief financial officer reported that Prime members bring in much of the companies earnings saying, “It is a great platform to feed.”
The companies goal is to have most of its 278 million active shoppers as Prime members.
A new addition to the Amazon market is a hotel-booking site as well as a home-improvement workers listing in attempts to attract all spectrums of customers.
Share have risen 6.5 percent in extended trading as well as stocks gaining 26 percent in the year so far.
It is recommended that buying an Amazon stock is a good idea right now. Robert Drbul a Nomura Securities International Inc. analyst tells Bloomberg, “For a company of this size, for them to continue to generate this kind of revenue growth is nothing short of impressive.”
Amazon not only generates money from their own gains but from the websites that use the Amazon Web Services for data storage and computing power. Companies like Pinterest and Netflix helped generate $265 million.
An analyst from Wedbush Securities in Los Angeles said, “They’re making a very healthy margin with AWS and they should get a higher margin as they continue to grow.”
Amazon has mastered the skill in making their competitors their clients. More than 2 million merchants have deals with Amazon for allowing them to sell their goods on their website where Amazon then gets a cut of their sales.
Amazon has added a new feature for Prime members who reside in six particular cities including Manhattan, Dallas, and Miami that offers free one-hour shipping on certain products. A feature called the Amazon Dash Button allows customers to order everyday products and groceries in a flash.
Another new feature is the voice-activated light switch connected with their Echo speakers.
Many of their new features are only available to the 35 million Prime members on Amazon.
Ben Schachter, the Macquarie Research analyst estimates that 50 percent of U.S. households will be Prime members by 2020.
Schachter says, “This has major implications for both Amazon and key retail competitors.”
“The only really bad news was international,” said Forrester Research Inc. analyst Sucharita Mulpuru.
Amazon’s international sales have dropped 1.8 percent to $7.75 billion but Mulpuru also said, “Lots of other companies have struggled with international growth.”
