Trick or Trend: I know the consensus is that Amazon saved the market with its earnings report; I have to disagree
The story to end last week was Amazon’s (AMZN) big earnings surprise on Thursday. Fourth-quarter sales increased 9.4% to $137.4 billion. Profit was $27.75 a share, aided largely by a pretax gain from the company’s investment in Rivian, which went public in November. Analysts, on average, projected revenue of $137.8 billion and earnings of $3.77 a share. (I’d note that the $22.75 a share in earnings and the projected $3.77 are not comparable due to that huge one-time gain from the Rivian IPO.) Wall Street was especially impressed by the performance of Amazon Web Services, the company’s cloud-computing division. AWS recorded sales of $17.8 billion, a 40% year-over-year increase, and operating profit of $5.29 billion. Adverting revenue for the quarter was was $9.7 billion, a 32% increase from a year earlier. Wall Street also gushed about the company’s decision to raise the price of its Amazon Prime membership by $20 a year to $139
