Amazon is due to release its next earnings report on or around July 25, and analysts are expecting a solid read with possible upside to consensus. All in all, it’s been a busy couple of months for the company with lots for investors to rave about. Amazon has already released early numbers indicating just how successful Prime Day was, although it has no bearing on the June quarter. We’re also hearing that Prime Instant Video is about to expand in Europe, and Amazon Web Services continues to be a source of growth for the Web behemoth.
AWS to make a strong showing in Amazon’s earnings
Deutsche Bank analyst Ross Sandler and team expect Amazon to post earnings results that are generally in line with expectations for the June quarter and potentially a little higher than consensus on revenue. and look for management to guide conservatively. Their bull case is based on AWS, and their checks indicate that the company releases updates quickly and regularly. They believe the focus should remain on Amazon’s cloud solutions, especially the products’ agility and speed rather than price.
Their checks indicate that Amazon is doing well across many verticals with the financial services sector, which amounts to 25% of IT spend, appearing to be at an inflection point. They believe that financial services might shift 20% to 30% of their workloads to the cloud within three years. They add that government, which makes up 15% of IT spend with Amazon ahead of all other players, hasn’t yet “meaningfully” embraced the public cloud. Going forward, they want to see AWS penetrate further into important verticals such as these.
So far, their U.K. checks have not indicated much of an impact from the Brexit vote, but they’re keeping an eye on the trends here. They continue to rate Amazon as a Buy with a $900 price target going into this month’s earnings report.
Amazon’s Prime Day was a huge success
Amazon said on Wednesday that the number of Prime Day orders soared by more than 60% globally year over year and more than 50% just in the U.S. alone. William Blair analyst Ryan Domyancic and team believe the increase was driven by an increase in the number of Prime members. The company reported a 51% increase in members last year. Another driver they see for the strong Prime Day sales was the greater number of deals as Amazon doubled the number of deals in the U.S.
Looking out to the third quarter, they expect the company to beat consensus for sales thanks to the strength of Prime Day. They noted that last year, year over year growth in electronics and other general merchandise revenue accelerated from the second to the third quarter, moving from an increase of 24% to 27%. They credit Prime Day with some of that acceleration.
Prime Instant Video to expand
Looking even further out, we’re hearing reports that Prime Instant Video will be rolling out to France, Spain and Italy, and Morgan Stanley analysts believe this will help Amazon grow its Prime service even more in Europe. A French newspaper reports that the company will launch Instant Video in all three markets before the end of the year.
Analyst Brian Nowak said more than 30% of people sign up for Prime because of video, so adding three more markets should result in faster growth, not only for Prime itself but also for gross merchandise volume. His AlphaWise survey indicated recently that 36% of Prime subscribers in the U.K. and 32% of subscribers in Germany list video as being a key factor in their decision to sign up. Since Prime members spend four times as much money on Amazon as non-Prime members, expanding Instant Video is likely to be huge.
Amazon shares were up 0.09% at $743.27 in afternoon trading on Thursday.
