Amazon.com shares surged after the annual profits of the online retailer soared 42%. This was against the expectations of Wall Street and showed that even in the shaky economy the consumers were comfortable in spending some money through online shopping.
Amazon said that there was no decline in the number of customers despite recession. Recent reports show that Amazon will continue to make profits in the coming months and the revenue in the current quarter is tipped to grow even more than expectations. Hence the company has announced a surprising $2 billion share buyback. This comes out despite the fact that the company’s stocks are trading near its record high.
Net income for the three months of last year was around $384 million, or 75 cents per share which was a rise of 71% as compared to $225 million, or 52 cents a share for the same period previous year. Revenue reported was $ 9.52 billion which was up by 42% as compared to last year statistics.
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos showed the success of company's Kindle electronic reader, and added that it sells 6 Kindle books for every 10 physical books and millions of people now own Kindle. The overall sales of media products were $4.7 billion for the quarter which grew 29% as compared to previous year. Sales of electronics and general merchandise jumped to $4.6 billion about to 60% rise. Sales of items in the ‘other’ category grew 32% to $231 million.
For the first quarter Amazon has predicted revenue in the range of $6.45 billion and $7 billion which is more than the analyst prediction of $6.36 billion.
