Just to follow up, Amazon has released their numbers. As expected, net income doesn’t look great — $177 million, down 58 percent year over year. But at least it’s not a loss (which Amazon had warned it might be).
That $177 million is on sales of $17.4 billion. Crazy. That’s what low margins — and selling hardware at a loss — will do to you.
Speaking of 177, that’s also the percentage that Amazon says Kindle sales increased during the holiday period when compared to the previous year — which means basically nothing since Amazon refused to release actual numbers last year. And they still refuse to this year.
Looking forward, Amazon expects profit to be anywhere from $100 million — to a $200 million loss next quarter. Ouch.
To be fair, unlike my earlier statement, Amazon did make more money in the entire quarter than Apple did in one day last quarter, but just barely: $177 million versus around $145 million.
But that’s an average. I’m sure during some of the busy shopping days, Apple actually did make more money in one day than Amazon did for the entire quarter.
Amazon’s profit for all of 2011 was $631 million. As a reminder, Apple made $13.06 billion in profit last quarter. Perhaps not a fair apples-to-apples comparison, but not exactly apples-to-oranges either.
Unbelievable!
