by Jason Wilk on January 29, 2009
- Amazon.com is scheduled to release fourth-quarter 2008 earnings results today in a conference call at 5:00 PM ET. You can catch the live webcast here.
- Amazon supposedly had the best holiday season ever, beating out many of the major retailers. They were selling 72.9 items per second during the holiday shopping season. Thomson Reuters expect Amazon to report a profit of $0.39 per share, compared to $0.48 per share in the same period of the previous year. Although the holiday sales season was a monster hit for Amazon, revenue for the quarter is expected to total $6.4 billion, down 13.5% from a year ago.
- As BloggingStocks points out, Amazon is notorious for blowing earnings reports out of the water, beating some quarterly reports by as much as 43%. As I have said before, Amazon is fine in the down economy. It comes down to a simple equation to define their success: There is a much greater increase in online shopping adoption compared to the decrease in consumer spending this year. Some investors realize this. The share price has risen more than 30% from its 52-week low back in November. It is still down 33% from a year ago, but expect things to continue trending upward for the online retail giant. Keep in mind, the Kindle 2 hasn’t even come out yet.
Earnings Are Out:
Highlights:
- Operating cash flow was $1.70 billion in 2008, compared with $1.41 billion in 2007.
- Free cash flow increased 16% to $1.36 billion in 2008, compared with $1.18 billion in 2007.
- Common shares outstanding plus shares underlying stock-based awards outstanding totaled 446 million on December 31, 2008, compared with 435 million a year ago.
- Net sales increased 18% to $6.70 billion in the fourth quarter, compared with $5.67 billion in fourth quarter 2007.
- Operating income was $272 million in the fourth quarter, compared with $271 million in fourth quarter 2007.
- Net income increased 9% to $225 million in the fourth quarter, or $0.52 per diluted share, compared with net income of $207 million, or $0.48 per diluted share, in fourth quarter 2007.
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by Jason Wilk on January 27, 2009
- Verizon posted Q4 revenue of $24.6 billion and profits of 61 cents a share, right in line with Wall St. predictions of $24.7 billion and 61 cents. Stock was down on the news as investors still bearish on the economy, increasing mobile competition for 2009, faulty RIM products and major infrastructure expenses about to be shelled out to build the new wireless spectrum.
- Stats: The company added 1.4 million net new wireless customers in the quarter, increasing the total to 72.1 million. That was up 9.9%, and does not include Alltel customers from the acquisition, which closed January 9.
- 303,000 new FiOS TV customers and 282,000 new FiOS Internet customers.
- Revenue was up 3.4% from a year ago, or 4.6% on an adjusted, non-GAAP basis.
- At least we’re getting a good idea of who to invest in the next time the economy crashes: Verizon, Google, Apple, very impressive earnings reports.
by Jason Wilk on January 16, 2009
- Breakdown of Yahoo’s new CEO compensation. A little ridiculous considering her experience running a search/advertising company (which is none)
1. Compensation. Your starting annual base salary will be at the rate of one million dollars ($1,000,000) per annum, less applicable taxes and withholdings, paid in accordance with the Company’s normal payroll practices and subject to annual review for increase (“Base Salary”). You will also be eligible to receive an annual target bonus of two hundred percent (200%) of your annual Base Salary (“Target Bonus”) to be determined by the Compensation Committee of the Board (the “Compensation Committee”) in its discretion based on your performance and the Company’s performance for the relevant year. The bonus program will have a maximum bonus of two (2) times the annual Target Bonus.
2. Inducement Stock Option Grant. As a part of the Company team, we strongly believe that ownership of the Company by our employees is an important factor to our success. Therefore, as part of your compensation, the Compensation Committee will grant you at its next scheduled meeting at which equity grants are to be made (currently scheduled for January 30, 2009) (the “Grant Meeting”) an option to purchase five million (5,000,000) shares of the Company’s common stock (the “Inducement Option”). The per share exercise price for the Inducement Option will be the fair market value of a share of the Company’s common stock on the date of grant as determined by the Compensation Committee… The Inducement Option shall be exercisable for seven (7) years from the date of grant, subject to earlier termination as provided herein, in the Plan and the applicable notice of stock option grant and stock option agreement.
by Jason Wilk on December 29, 2008
- LG has released photos of its latest mobile offering, the LG-GD910 wrist-phone featuring 3G and HSDPA support. The phone comes with a 1.43-inch color LCD touchscreen along with a video camera in the watch face for conferencing, video chat, etc. If that’s not enough for you, the phone will also have text-to-speech (TTS) capabilities, Bluetooth, MP3 playback and voice dialing with speech recognition. The phone is said to be released at CES in January. Would you wear a wrist phone? I would.
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Letter From Carol Bartz To Yahoo Employees
by Jason Wilk on January 25, 2009
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