Amazon soars after earnings beat
cnbc.com
cnbc.com
- 150 million amazon prime users globally (equivalent to to combined france + germany population (or) half of US population). Impressive!!
- Rivian is integrating Alexa into its electric vehicle lineup, including its upcoming fleet of 100,000 all-electric Amazon delivery van. Amazon has made investments in Rivian. Going to compete with Tesla?
- Amazon Music has more than 55 million customers worldwide. Collectively, in the U.S., U.K., Germany, and Japan, Amazon Music customers have grown nearly 50% year-over-year;
- Prime Video received eight Golden Globe Award nominations, with Fleabag winning Best Television Series, Musical or Comedy, as well as Best Performance by an Actress in a Television Series, Musical or Comedy, for Phoebe WallerBridge.
- AWS announced three Arm-based instances (M6g, C6g, R6g) powered by AWS’s new Graviton2 processors, that deliver up to 40% better price and performance than current x86 processor-based instances. Threat to intel?
- AWS announced the general availability of AWS Outposts, a fully-managed service that extends AWS infrastructure and services to virtually any data center, co-location space, or on-premises facility. On-premises is gaining strength?
https://ir.aboutamazon.com/static-files/f3589a21-d023-4e4c-9...
Getting ARM laptops to work is going to require OS-level changes. If Amazon shipped one now, they’d either need to ship a fork of a linux desktop OS with good app compatibility or wait for MS to crack the ARM walnut with one of their ARM compatibility projects.
I feel pretty confident that this is a “hardware follows software” situation: laptop manufacturers may be tempted to make ARM laptops right now, but I think they’re probably waiting for MS to ship a version of “Windows for ARM” that is generally seen to be successful.
The distinction of “successfully shipping Windows on ARM” is a subjective one and depends on the needs of each user. Although that being said, I don’t think we can really say “ARM laptops have arrived” until they either have great gaming compatibility or great compatibility with some large group of productivity apps. I think they’ll get there, but they aren’t there in January 2020.
If not, if you have a good CI/CD pipeline, you can just build them yourselves. In that situation, not too bad.
If you don't build your own software and packages you need don't have arm builds, a bit more difficult - you'r going to have to start building things.
If you're using proprietary software, you're at their mercy.
Having done a lot of work with Raspberry Pis over the past few years, I’ve been pretty impressed with the number of libraries and packages that compile for ARM. I’ve done stuff like building fullscreen electron apps (for theatre projections), doing some light video processing in ffmpeg, running a plex server, running a DIY Time Capsule (which required formatting a drive with HFS+ and then using some HFS+ based libraries).
There are probably holes: I haven’t tried doing deep learning stuff on a Pi (I’d guess some frameworks work and some don’t but I don’t know which) and to that end I definitely haven’t tried anything CUDA related (I have no idea if Nvidia’s proprietary drivers compile for ARM).
But overall, I get the feeling that with Android a lot of libraries started shipping for ARM, which made Raspberry Pi possible, which has gotten more libraries and packages to ship for ARM, which should hopefully make people’s transition in serverland much easier (especially if you’re doing run of the mill web server stuff).
AWS is an amazing business itself but it's easy to underestimate what a massive strategic advantage it is for amazon - compared to other retailers - to have it in their portfolio! [edited M to B - thanks for catching that :)]
That's by design. Amazon has found it's far more effective to deploy their excess capital toward company expenditures in the form of acquisitions, real estate, capex, employees, stock buybacks, etc rather than letting it get taxed as corporate operating income.
Those dollars do ultimately get taxed, to be clear, but in the form of employment taxes, individual capital gains, individual income taxes, and property taxes.
edit: Take for example McDonalds. What are they supposed to invest in? Its a mature business at this point, and over-investment in random things would just destroy shareholder value.
Acquisitions depend on what is being acquired. Goodwill can be depreciated.
But you’re right, I had forgotten that it may be amortized for tax purposes when it comes from a taxable asset sale (not for an stock-based acquisition).
Were the writers/sellers lacking of foresight? Were buyers prescient? Was everyone gambling?
Options writers can and should hedge losses by not writing naked calls (highly risky in situations exactly like this) and instead buy a higher strike option which caps losses e.g. a vertical spread.
But the state lottery is literally a dumb lotto bet with super high volume.
So I don’t see how this wasn’t some set of lucky gamblers. If ER went another way, there’d be some other group making lots of money. Everyone speculating about the future (which is fine depending on the financial circumstances of involved individuals)
Suppose I own AMZN already at a lower cost basis and believe the $2000 strike is approximately the maximum, say for example I believe the stock will drop after a short rally. Then I'd write a call; if the stock doesn't reach $2000, I earn the premium, even when the earnings are bad and the stock tanks; if the stock does reach $2000, I earn the premium and realize the gains on the stock, with only a bit of a FOMO.
That's one of the most basic option strategies known as a covered call.
Amateurs trade OOM options because they think it is going to pop. That volume is very small.
Most of OOM volume comes from trading complex spreads.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/ewcebh/amzn...
Half (I made that number up) of AWS revenue is passthrough to hardware vendors.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/01/16/popsock...
[2] https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-employees-describe-pe...
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/apr/02/revealed-...
[4] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/11/14/how-ama...
[5] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/04/amazo...
My friend shows up alone. Why?
"Oh, we believe in work-life balance, and he wants to leave work at 6 tonight because he wants to see his kids, so he's not taking lunch today."
Anecdata, but it's true.
All those things are always discussed tirelessly in HN every time there’s something about Amazon. We get it. And it’s ok to bring them up here. But how about adding something useful to the discussion, instead of just making that statement and posting a bunch of links?
Eh. Speak for yourself.
Either the vast market that they exploit is ignorant to their abuse of the world, or the vast market is knowingly participating in fairly a-moral behavior knowingly.
I prefer to think that people are generally good (moral) & naive, so i'll continue parroting the point everytime Amazon comes up, just on the off chance that i'll elucidate to someone Amazon's true nature that they may otherwise be unaware of.
Speaking of topics that are spoken of ceaselessly on HN : Amazon's success and profit. Where's your issue with that topic?
> What’s the point of this comment besides being inflammatory?
I think that's an absolutely atrocious response to anything human-rights related.
Capitalism is a nasty, amoral system by nature. Saying some companies are good and others are bad is just scapegoating.
If everybody boycotts amazon tomorrow, they'll be replaced by a company that does the same stuff - because amazon have proved that it works, and that it is profitable. Nothing but legistlation can stop that. Talking about how bad amazon is obcures this.
Actually, this isn't the case. Not too long ago, orphan drugs were actually reasonably priced. Cuprimine went up from 500 USD to 24000 USD for a 30-day supply when Valeant bought the original manufacturer, and Daraprim went up from 13.50 USD/dose to 750 USD/dose thanks to Shkreli: https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-senate-drug-price-stu...
Something changed, but I'm not sure what.
And they can do it since competition won’t bother to jump through FDA hoops.
Not that again. Bioequivalence is important so that a patient can take Levothyroxin 75 μg from Ranbaxy one month and Levothyroxin 75 μg from Teva next month and notice no difference. Unfortunately, the market for orphan drugs is so small that it's impossible to recover the outlays.
But yes, these markets where formally cheap drugs get 100x price increases are tiny markets where the outlay to get FDA approval is more than they’d make on it.
If everyone rewards companies for being nasty because that's somehow "smart" or "successful", then the nasty companies will be among the most successful ones.
If everyone boycotts companies that do unethical things, then those companies will be punished financially and ethical behavior will be economically incentivized.
Choose the world in which you want to live.
I don't see how that could ever work. So, in my eyes, it's not choosing the world you want to live. It's engaging in some magical thinking to feel good about yourself. If you want to change the world, vote. Better still, organize. Take the time you would have spent researching the ethical status of one company or another and look into the history of campaigns to improve working conditions. Some campaigns have worked - but I have never heard of, and cannot imagine there are any, that were consumer boycotts.
2. If you reward companies for being bad, then they will be bad. If you reward companies for selling blue items, they will sell more blue items. Your own logic about amorality dictates this. Why is it so hard to understand?
This was widely publicized. According to your theory, such an extreme 'bad' act would have led to disaster for the company. In reality, it didn't even lead to rebranding. They were bought by Dow Chemicals - but that was because they had massive debts. I think they cannot have been related to the Bhopal disaster, since their compensation paid was very small.
One salient fact here is that moral hazard is not contagious. Many products are for other businesses, who aren't likely to pay a premium for ethical considerations. Another fact here is that even in the most famous and awful cases of bad companies, you're relying on the company's own branding to tell informed customers to stay away. Which is obviously extremely fragile - the company can rebrand, even if the customers are reliably informed (how many people on the street know about Bhopal? Is it present when they buy shrink wrap? Is it even possible to know that your shrink wrap was made using ethylene from union carbide?
All seems a bit absurd to me. Even before you get into the inherent asymetries of the idea (is Bill Gate's ethical opinion worth more than a billion poor people? As an ethical consumer, it is.)
How do you figure those laws are created, if not by public pressure? And how would publish pressure be created if not by talking about the amoral behavior of companies?
If you target specific techniques and practices (for instance, child labour, historically) then the supporters and lobbyists have to actually justify the problematic stuff - they can't just hide behind the nebulous vagueness of all the things big companies do.
Thanks for being super creepy, and digging through my profile. Unfortunately you couldn’t even get that right. And by the way, even if I still worked there I can’t see how that discredits my opinion.
But since you seem to going down that route, I can say confidently that I don’t like Amazon as an employer and many times I don’t like it when I interact with it as a customer. Mind blowing, right? Someone who can be critical and still tries to seek objective opinions.
no problem, next time there's a potential conflict of interest then state it in your post
> Unfortunately you couldn’t even get that right.
it's hardly my fault if your resume on your website is out of date
You mean 'compete with'? I.e. the purpose of companies and markets?
Shopping- Walmart is catching up (but will probably not beat. It's a lossy business for Amazon I believe and as people realize the counterfeit problem the business goes down )
Cloud- MS will beat them in 3 years (which doesn't mean they will lose customers but growth will slow down )
Other areas they have tough competition.
I'm beginning to wonder if it's a stock bought by faithful.
Is this actually true? I thought MS bundled a bunch of "office 365" stuff in with "cloud" to boost their numbers.
They break out enough:
"AWS generated revenue of $10 billion in the fourth quarter, up 34% from a year earlier. Operating income grew 19% to $2.6 billion."