ChannelAdvisor

Highlights of Amazon's Q4 blow out

Amazon reported Q4 results today and the e-commerce giant really made quite a showing.  By all means it was a blow-out quarter.  Amazon topped their guidance, Wall Street Consensus (WSC) and even surprised most on Wall St. with their Q1 guidance.

Here are the highlights from the quarter along with some color commentary.

• Revenue - $9.52b vs. WSC of $9b (a near $500m beat!)- Represents 42% y/y growth vs. WSC of 34.7% (a 7% beat!)
• Op income - $597 vs. WSC of $542 - a $55m beat (10%)

• EPS - $.85 vs. WSC of $.72 (a $.13 beat!)
• Media grew: 23%. US media grew: 20% , Intl media grew: 26% 
• EGM grew: 54% (Wow!)  EGM is now a $4.61 business.  US EGM grew: 54% (a material acceleration, benefits from Zappos addition) and Intl EGM grew: 56% 
• From a mix perspective the Media/EGM mix is now 49%/48% - the highest EGM in the history of Amazon the US/Intl mix is now 52% / 48% - also the highest Intl in the history of Amazon

One little Kindle tidbit - Amazon finally put a metric out there and said that there are now 'millions' of Kindle users.    That's a vague number, but analysts were pretty amazed that we could be looking at over 2m units out there.

Follow the share...

Well now we have the baseline of e-commerce growth which Comscore is reporting at 3% y/y for Q409.  We also have eBay coming in at 4% right at the baseline.  And now we have Amazon coming in at 42% (39% greater than ecommerce) and if you look at just EGM, it goes up to a whopping 54% or 50% greater than e-commerce (and 49% greater than eBay).  That's a truly amazing growth rate given the efforts of the big players to catch up.

How is Amazon doing it?

We have been getting a lot of questions from retailers, Wall St, and other general e-commerce participants wondering what Amazon's secret sauce is behind this incredible, sustained, and accelerating share gain.  Every year in Feb. after the Q4 results, we do a series comparing eBay and Amazon.  This year we'll go through that process again and in addition to pointing out some areas of improvement for eBay, we'll call out some of the major and minor things that Amazon is doing to delight customers and fuel growth.

SeekingAlpha Disclosure - I am long Amazon, Google and eBay is an investor in ChannelAdvisor where I am CEO.

Amazon's Q4 results - coming shortly.

Everyone in the world of e-commerce has been watching the eBay, Google, Y! and iPad/Apple news with interest, but to be honest, that is all a side show to the main event tonight - Amazon's Q4 earnings.

Here's what to watch for in a handy cheat sheet:

• Revenue - Consensus is $9.04 which is at the high end of the companies $8.125-$9.125b guidance
• Growth rates - the market is really interested in the North American and International growth rates.  Q3 was 24% for the US and some see it going as high as 29-35%.  Wall St is having the hardest time with this. I always look at this four ways:
• • US vs. International
  • Media vs. EGM
• Profit - guidance was $300-425m - it will be interesting to see if they blow this away.

Zappos being in the mix is going to make it a little bit confusing, but stay tuned for the news as it hits...

Seeking Alpha Disclosure- I am long Amazon and Google. eBay is an investor in ChanelAdvisor where I am CEO.

Survey says...Amazon continues to pull away from competition

Piper Jaffray's Internet analyst, Gene Munster, is out today with their quarterly survey of 300 online buyers.  The trends for Amazon are very impressive and over on eBay Strategies you'll see that eBay is going the opposite direction.

When asked about the site with the best shopping experience online, Amazon scored an amazing 65% with 'other site' at an all time low of 35%.  You can see the details in the table below and also the graph at the bottom.

In 2010, I'm going to go into some more detail of the literally hundreds of improvements Amazon has made over the last year to the buying experience.  Individually they are probably not too exciting, but when you add them together, they are clearly having an impact on consumer behavior and elevating Amazon in the consideration set as witnessed by this survey.

 SeekingAlpha Disclosure - I am long Google and Amazon.  eBay is an investor in ChannelAdvisor where I am CEO.