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A weekly podcast with the latest e-commerce news and events. Episode 298 is a recap of Amazon’s Q3 2022 Earnings.
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Episode 298 is a recap of Amazon’s Q3 2022 Earnings Report.
Episode 298 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded on Friday October 28th, 2022.
Transcript
Jason:
[0:23] Welcome to the Jason and Scot show
this is episode 298 being recorded on Friday October 28 2022 I’m your host Jason retailgeek Goldberg and as usual I’m here with your co-host Scot Wingo.
Scot:
[0:38] Hey Jason and welcome back Jason Scott show listeners
Jason wouldn’t be a Jason Scott show if we didn’t have a Little Star Wars talk I have a confession,
I’m really digging and or I think the rest of the Star Wars universe is out there hating on it but I’m really enjoying it I really
I liked the character from Rogue one and it’s been fun seeing kind of a slower more character-driven Star Wars so have you had a chance to watch that at all.
Jason:
[1:07] I have I have and I’m with you now I’m not sure I was with you at the beginning it took me a little while to warm up to it.
But definitely the last three or four episodes have been a lot more engaging so now I’m eager for the next episode to come out.
Scot:
[1:24] Yeah and then when I haven’t seen it it’s getting a lot of buzz those tales of the Jedi which this is kind of from the right before A New Hope ERA with and or and then tells of the Jedi goes back to the prequels so talking about some of the characters there and then clone wars and stuff so that’s on my list of things I’m going to do this weekend.
Jason:
[1:41] Fun I watch the first episode of that this won’t be a problem for you but we’re like oh cool another animated Star Wars series this would be great to watch with our seven year old and it’s.
A little dark it’s a little it’s a little adult for a seven-year-old.
Scot:
[1:57] Had to fast forward some places.
Jason:
[1:59] Yeah we had to be ready.
Scot:
[2:01] Well thanks for joining us everyone we wanted to talk to this is the you know we’re in this critical part of the retailgeek
calendar where we’re barreling towards Halloween we got Q3 behind us and we’re
were basically into the holiday season so we wanted to update everyone on some of the releases that came out here from the big
companies specifically Amazon we’re going to take a deep dive into that but I always think it’s interesting to kind of see the setup longtime listeners will remember that
one thing I think both Jason are proud of is we identified at Apple’s changed privacy called IDF a some people call it a TT
I’m just going to call it I DFA to keep it simple as this huge problem that no one was willing paying attention to and we are still feeling the ripples for that.
What’s been Jason two years now two years later 18 months.
Jason:
[2:51] Yeah it’s crazy.
Scot:
[2:52] Yes so it’s gotten it’s gotten really crazy so so this the lead up to Amazon started with Snapchat as if we clean does
and I say this I’ve said this for the last three quarters.
Horst the so not only do their you know they had this period of time where they felt like they had stabilized but it’s very clear the management team has no idea what’s going on with idea if a they don’t have a solution in Wall Street has kind of lost all.
All hope and then their quarterly calls are just total Bedlam like it’s a nothing I’ve ever seen before so.
[3:24] If you’re an entrepreneur and want to see what a reason not to go public go to listen to one of the Snapchat Wall Street colors they do not go well.
[3:33] And then so that was that was kind of a bit of a train wreck but not surprised that this kind of like the third Trainwreck so you’re kind of used to it
I think the one thing that started the spook Wall Street was Google came out on the 25th and they basically their results were below expectations and they
YouTube specifically they have their segments we talked a lot about the Amazon segments but they have a they have a search segment a third-party search segment like a
first party search didn’t call this but they have the I guess they call it the network which is Google off of Google so that would be like the Apple search experience that they have the Google search experience than they have the YouTube and all these other things
within the alphabet family
well the YouTube one is under a lot of pressure and it’s not really clear it feels like it’s duly suffering from idea of a problems like advertisers are not being able to track the efficacy of those YouTube videos anymore
but then also The Tick-Tock you know so you would know better than I do I only have one 16 year old and a
ten-year-old nice to reference but seems like everyone under a certain age and even over,
even creeping into our age group is just spending hours of looking at Tick-Tock videos so that has become a huge problem for YouTube because there’s only so many hours in the day and if you’re looking at Tik-Tok videos during all of them you’re not watching YouTube
do you have any insights into the tick tock world.
Jason:
[4:57] Yeah no I actually think it might be interesting to explore a Tick-Tock deep dive in an upcoming episode because it it really is
the social platform that feels like it’s grabbing all the oxygen right now I thought the audience engagement
is way up there’s you know there’s been a bunch of interesting Evolutions about
segments of the audience that are using Tik-Tok is their primary search engine which is interesting and surprising I think to a lot of people
Google is certainly trying to position Tik-Tok search is a viable competitor to Google which you know might have be true have be.
Antitrust and then.
Also true that we have been on these recent studies recently that a lot of Millennials are using Tick-Tock primary as their primary source of news so that’s another.
You know Factor but it’s just winning a lot of entertainment minutes right now.
Which also by the way means it’s winning a lot of advertising dollars because the advertisers want to go where the engaged eyeballs are.
That’s been a big thing.
Scot:
[6:06] Yeah the other thing that’s interesting and I didn’t put this in the show notes just occurred to me both Android and Apple are seeing softness in their App Store revenues.
[6:16] Specifically in the game segment so there’s two schools of thought there one is
there’s so one of it is the idea of a his rippled into that where the games are not getting as many new customers because they’re not running as much advertising because they can’t measure the efficacy of it
this one’s interesting because this could be an indication apple shot themselves in the foot with IDF a most impact we’ve talked about on this show have been beneficial to Amazon where you know crushing Facebook or hurting Google
that’s obviously kind of you know those are the Nemesis nemus I the Nemesis of
of Apple but this is one where you’re starting to see it actually impact them in I think they called their services Revenue so that’s one school of thought the other school of thought is in a
yeah I don’t give us enough data on this is that know it’s Tick-Tock because people are just sitting there watching so many technical games it’s replaced
deployment of casual games so people aren’t paying playing these addictive little Candy Crush type games and Clash of Clans there they’re watching The Tick-Tock videos so so it’s interesting to watch these consumer behaviors are changing very
quickly in this
post covid World in interesting ways and it’s hard to tease out exactly what’s going on but there’s definitely you know some some big changes out here that I think will Ripple into our listeners in the retail e-commerce world as well.
Jason:
[7:38] Yeah it is I do think both of those things are factors I also think there’s another interesting.
Thing happening with the the game revenue from the app store’s I feel like their history is repeating itself a little bit,
if you’re super old-school like you and I you remember all the old console-based Wars right like Nintendo vs. Sega and Atari and in television and one of the themes that played out on those platform things is.
Often one of the platforms would be super open and invite a bunch of Publishers to make it really easy to publish titles and so there would.
Bi huge dearth of titles but they would mostly be of low quality and then another platform would make it really hard to publish titles which would really restrict the.
The amount of titles that were available but they tended to be better and over the history of video games the latter strategy has always won,
that way when you have too many crappy titles eventually like the audience is get disenfranchised and they leave the platform.
Does feel a little bit like that is what’s like the App Store Revenue became so lucrative for these guys that they made it super easy for everyone to
bring titles there’s no more discovery on the platform because there’s the signal-to-noise ratio is so poor that the only way you would discover a new game title would be via.
A Facebook ad which no longer works right I can sew it all of this is kind of coming to roost it feels like.
Scot:
[9:03] Got it yeah the and then so
that got everyone kind of wonky and then Facebook / meta did their release and that was just that was that went from their last Q2 was kind of concerning and then this was kind of a train wreck so there
expenses are running rampant they are spending a lot of money on virtual reality and they’re seeing no revenue from that that revenue is way off where it should be they are announcing they announced like did you see this the pro headset which is like
twelve hundred dollars and it can track your your arms and feet and even your facial expressions or something it’s super fancy but.
You know they’re not seeing any engagement from people buying the Oculus I guess they don’t call that anymore buying the devices and.
[9:52] The Medical West buying the medic West or any of that kind of stuff so then you would think they would get on there and say alright Q3 was rough we’re going to
we’re going to moderate this going into the queue for they’re like nope we’re going to double down and it’s got actually get worse in Q4 so that that freak people out Jim Cramer on CNBC MSNBC Junkie,
he had the previously days he said that you know he predicted they would come to their senses and do a little layoff and this kind of thing and it was the opposite and he got on TV and apologize to the viewers and got kind of emotional there so that was that was interesting and you know day
there they seem,
totally distracted by the metaverse and not really didn’t really have much commentary around ads it’s off a fair amount they’re due to IDF a as well and then.
A bright spot was then yesterday morning so this is Thursday morning
Shopify announced and they had a little bit of positive news what did you see there Jason.
Jason:
[10:51] Yeah yeah they actually had a meet and beat all around,
the you know revenue is up 22 percent.
You know there’s a bunch of different metrics at Shopify these days because they have like the recurring Revenue they have the attachment sales attachment sales were are particularly interesting in this is,
how many of the various Shopify Services each Merchant uses so are they using shop pay are they using
Shopify fulfillment the the POS system all these things in the the attachment rate went way up which is encouraging for Shopify
and the Marquee number is probably total gmv going through their system and that was up by 11% so it was 46 billion dollars for the quarter,
um
and you know the Shopify is really been beaten up the last few quarters in and you know had a lot of down quarters and a lot of it was like,
e-commerce got overhyped and Shopify overbuilt and now that reality setting in they’re getting creamed and so they’re the
the guidance was pretty low and Shopify had a pretty solid quarter and sailed by it so I think their stock has had a nice little boost as a result of that.
Scot:
[12:12] In shopify’s coming out liar because they do this pre-market announcement which is kind of the new fashion because there’s so many companies that do aftermarket that you don’t get the analysts that you want on your call so they’ve moved to kind of a morning,
announcement so they did Thursday morning and then that set up Amazon it wouldn’t be a Jason Scott show without.
Marker 01
Jason:
[12:31] Amazon news your margin is there opportunity.
Scot:
[12:43] Well that other way the way I would characterize this one is a missing lower so from a Wall Street perspective they’re always kind of thinking how did you do against our expectations for the current period and then how did you do for our forward-looking expectations so
so Amazon missed current and then actually lowered kind of missed the future as well.
Let’s dig into it there’s mostly mostly a lot of headwinds which does not bode well for an e-commerce or retail holiday here in the fourth quarter but let’s dig into it and there are some there are some positives in here that will pick out
so also as we record this the stock’s down 10% which you know Amazon is one of the largest
capitalized stocks out there at over a trillion dollars so 10% is a hundred billion dollars in so a lot of a lot of money sloshing around and it was.
Jason:
[13:33] It’s like two Twitter’s.
Scot:
[13:34] Yes yeah it is.
[13:36] Good enough and if it’s down to Twitter’s today and it was down as much as 20 percent in after-hours trading so so really
really kind of a tough report here the other caveat before we dig in is
I don’t know if most people track this because unless you went on an international trip or had some international business you would know but one theme we’re going to talk a lot about is Europe so your
how’s the.
Geopolitical issues with the Ukrainian situation there and then they have an energy problem because they get most of their energy from Russia so they’re having energy,
it also are suffering from similar inflation trends that we’re seeing there’s a worse because the energy is
orders of magnitude worse than we see here in United States that has created a currency fluctuation very unusual so so it used to be that.
You know dollar was worth euros worth of many dollars and now that is inverted or like parody there and the pound is these currencies are at.
Multi-year multi-decade lows versus the dollars so the problem when you’re like Amazon and you have a pretty big chunk of your Revenue coming from International entity like that when you compare your periods it creates a financial Exchange headwind.
I will report all these numbers without that but it is
created you know the absolute dollars of Revenue and whatnot are off even more due to that currency headwind that that’s out there.
[15:04] So let’s look first it Revenue.
Revenues came in at 120 7.1 billion Wall Street was expecting a hundred twenty seven point four billion so that point three billion was the myth that’s three hundred million dollars that’s.
Into to that Ridge retailer that’s pretty cataclysmic that’s actually pretty small from a personal standpoint and you know I think if you looked at the financial exposure and whatnot it largely
can be explained there the one of the bright spots will talk about is North America Revenue so this could actually bode well for listeners that are have almost
just pure United States exposure
the revenues were up 20 percent year over year which is pretty impressive in an acceleration from last Q which was 10% now they did have a this right Jason they had a prime day that that was that was an October 1.
Jason:
[15:54] Yeah I think that’s going to be in the queue for numbers.
Scot:
[15:56] Yeah okay so that’s without.
Jason:
[15:57] And and we don’t call it Prime day we call it early Prime axis.
Scot:
[16:00] Yes the thing that we will not be called printing the artist previously known as permanent so so that was good and then you tracked e-commerce data closer than I do that that’s got to be.
Pretty significantly above the Census Bureau data right.
Jason:
[16:16] It’s it slightly above that so we don’t have Q3 e-commerce data yet so we only have that non store.
Sales data and it’s it’s in line with an OnStar sales data but the e-commerce data is usually a little lower so next month will get that and I do have a feeling that.
Amazon’s Q3 is going to outperform the the industry’s e-commerce.
Scot:
[16:42] Yep and then where is retail where did retail end.
Jason:
[16:46] Pretty high also the this I’m going to buy time while II.
Pull up my number but this is kind of the so year-to-date retails up 9.1%.
So I didn’t I didn’t do a Q3 breakout but.
Overall spending in North America by consumers has remain robust which like has shown up in the Amazon earnings and shown up in the.
The Shopify earnings which is you know I think somewhat surprised a lot of people because with all the
the economic news people are kind of expecting that consumers would tighten their belt and it seems like they’ve changed what they spend on but they’re continuing to spend so far.
Scot:
[17:34] Yeah yeah so that’s that’s right spot and then to kind of pair that in
with a dark spot International revenues were down 12 percent and that’s when you take out the impact of foreign currency so Europe is definitely in what I would call an e-commerce / retail recession you know
have a lot of empathy for folks their power bills are just surging and they’re having to decide you know do I do I pay my for my heat or do I buy a pair of shoes online or whatever it is so so I think we’re going to have really rough
q4q on here for anyone that has exposure to Europe now Amazon to their credit did manage their expenses and beat on the bottom line here so it was less they were able to kind of take this downward Trend and manage their expenses and so it wasn’t a.
Double A Miss Revenue Miss profit so it was a Miss on Revenue lower Revenue than expected but then also they kind of made it up
Bob with efficiencies that being said you know it’s a
this is pretty interesting so so FedEx is one of the first companies kind of say hey we think we’re heading into a global recession then everyone else said we don’t see it and then so this is another data point that kind of says yeah there’s something really going on and we’re really starting to see it in the data here
so
Jason:
[18:50] And you know there was a Jeff Bezos tweet like a week or two ago that was like kind of his own POV and I think it was batten down the hatches.
Scot:
[19:00] Yeah yeah so you’d imagine being on the board he sees the other thing that’s interesting with these big companies as they get a fair amount of time to do this you know so we’re.
You know they’ve got another month of data that they’re looking at so that we’ll talk about the fourth quarter so there’s
reading the body language it feels like it’s getting worse so we’ll talk about that
but on the bottom line so all that was the top line and kind of the interior parts of Revenue let’s look at the profitability operating income came in at 2 .5 3 billion versus 2.94 billion so that’s a
point for billions of 400 million which again isn’t isn’t a massive number but percentage-wise it’s about a 15 to 20 percent Miss so that.
[19:42] Really big percentage Miss on the bottom line of expectations so yeah so that’s the you know it was a Miss on the top line Miss on the bottom line so so overall Miss and then we’ll talk about the lower
I did see a couple interesting details the two I picked out that I’ll kick it over to you Jason third-party unit so this is a metric that’s near and dear to my heart hit a new high of 58 percent of units so one of the things I
I in my mind that Amazon has a sliver that they can pull and send more
dual s1p and more 3p if they want to drive profit over Revenue so that there’s a trade-off there higher they have a high margin high margin
low Revenue high margin business High Revenue low margin business and they can kind of like dial between those and it feels like that
pulled that dial over towards the 3p side that could also be supply chain issues there’s a million things that go on there
the thing that was interesting is Amazon goes through these what I would call invest in Harvest cycles and during covid they invested a major amount they almost doubled their fulfillment for,
and today they signaled the Wall Street in Q2 that they were going to go through kind of a harvesting phase where they were going to stop adding capacity in fact they’ve actually.
[20:56] You know they’ve shut down somewhere houses they sold some so that they’ve actually started this this kind of,
harvesting mode from all that investment where that’s reflected is in the symmetric they release called shipping expenses which they measure as a percentage of online store revenues it was 37.2%
and that’s an improvement this quarter over last quarter’s 37.9% so that’s pretty impressive especially you know the sales grew through there so so to be able to grow the 20% we’re talking about and reduce expenses is very impressive
on the call they said that they were able to squeeze out a billion dollars in operation Improvement in the quarter and that they were pretty excited about that but they actually felt like they had missed their
tear internal goal by 500 so we’re going to do 1.5 billion and they came out with a billion so I suspect we’ll see some of those things come in the fourth quarter they did say that that thing that we will not call Prime day
cause I was a little bit of a challenge because you know
they are so you’re sitting there and you’re like putting the screws to things and you’re really figuring out and then suddenly you have this day where you have a record number of orders come through and it that makes it hard to do so they that was a speed bump in that,
any other little tidbits you saw in the big picture before we dive into some of the other pieces.
Jason:
[22:11] Yeah mine we’re probably a little more frivolous frivolous than yours but we always talk about you know how Amazon hates the profitability metric and they you know they talk about Gap profitability not being.
Like that relevant and how much more that Jeff Bezos likes free cash flow well another example of that hitting home for me was in this earnings call they kind of talked about the last couple quarters of,
of their profitability and what a huge impact,
the value of the rivi on stock was on it and it like literally was like the most influential thing in whether you know they they were profitable or not,
and so you know rivi on had a better quarter this time than last quarter and so that that materially changed Amazon’s profitability.
So it’s just it’s funny because they’re they’re not solely owned by Amazon but the Amazon is a major investor like that that’s a.
Kind of X Factor and their earnings that may have been previously obvious to you but then the way more important one.
So you know the their first season of rings of power wrapped up two weeks ago and everyone in the entertainment industry has noted that they really haven’t come out and bragged about any audience measure metrics from that show.
And we know Amazon likes to brag about its winds so the assumption is that it was a little underwhelming from a performance standpoint and then in this earnings.
[23:40] They reference that they got nearly a hundred million viewers for the show
so that probably means they got less than 90 million viewers or they would have just said 100 million but well,
generously say they got a hundred million views eight episodes of the show
that means they averaged about 12.5 million viewers per episode and to put that in perspective HBO has said they got to north of 29 million.
Views per episode of House of the Dragon so.
You know compared to a normal TV show those are all good numbers but these are you know the world’s most expensive TV show so it does seem in this first season that HBO is better at getting an audience for their.
Their Blockbuster TV shows then then Amazon is so far.
Scot:
[24:29] I’ve heard better I haven’t watched either I’m saving them for a holiday binge but I’ve heard more positive Buzz of from House of dragon than the rings of power but I don’t know.
Jason:
[24:40] Yeah I mean I think both are totally watchable I enjoyed both there’s this weird don’t you know there’s people that have such a love for the the.
Both Worlds that you know the TV shows fall fall short of people’s expectations and so I like I have a feeling for like huge.
Um you know Cannon lovers of Lord of the Rings that like you know they might have been a little extra disappointed but if you kind of just come into it cold and say hey is this a good.
Piece of of fantasy fiction and is entertaining to watch I thought it was pretty good.
[25:16] And then the last thing and you alluded this little bit the early Prime access is not in the Q3 numbers but they do reference it in the earnings and.
It was a a successful event like it’s very clear that it did not.
Come close to approaching the level of success that Prime day typically has or even that the prime day in October a couple years ago had.
Um and you know so there’s been a lot made a lot of media has written about oh it’s a failure because it’s not another huge.
Spike like Prime day I’m not actually sure that was the bar or the goal
you know Amazon like every other retailer has a lot of imperfect inventory at the moment and I’ll and it seems like they got a chance to sell through a lot of that at this event and so like you know I think.
How you judge that event has a lot to do with what you think the success criteria of the event was but
that that’s another sort of tidbit like they certainly didn’t come at you know if it had been a home run it would have been one of the top Six Bullets at the at the beginning of their their earnings press release and it was not.
Scot:
[26:30] Yeah this this kind of goes to the changing consumer Behavior another thing that didn’t chat with you before we prepped his again I watch a lot of CNBC.
Jason:
[26:40] Audience members are going to be surprised to find out that we ever prepped.
Scot:
[26:43] Are very light prep the both CEO of hurts United and of think it was American or Delta Airlines
they’ll talk about these new patterns they’re seeing and travel wear and then there’s not a great name for it yet but what’s happening is people will go on a personal or a business trip and they’re staying longer and because so many people are
working working
you know remote they’ll go and do they’ll go on like let’s say you had a business trip somewhere you and your significant other could go to that and then have fun and then stay three more days into the next week so what used to be like little snack size trips like two or three-day trips both for personal and business have turned into these six eight ten day
type trips.
Jason:
[27:29] Yeah it’s work Leisure I’m naming it but yeah.
Scot:
[27:32] Yeah there you go so you know so then people are spending a lot more money on that which I think could be part of you know
people only have so big a wallet and whatnot so yeah so it’s gonna be interesting to see how this holiday sets of it’s going to there’s so many changing behaviors I
it’s going to be a lot to pick out of this one.
Jason:
[27:54] Yeah no for sure I do think.
Again you know people are talking about all these economic headwinds you ordinarily that slows consumer spending way down so far we haven’t in North America seeing,
consumer spending slowdown but what they’ve spent on has toy changed a your point it is still more.
Sort of like experiences and pent-up demand for things that people weren’t able to do,
during the height of the pandemic and it is you know they’re spending more of their wallet on on needs instead of wants as the needs have gotten more expensive due to inflation so write to me the most common story we’re hearing is.
Revenue looks pretty strong but profitability really sucks because we’re we’re selling the wrong stuff and we don’t have enough of the right stuff in stock.
Scot:
[28:42] Yeah nursing will you dug into the AWS and adds what did you see there.
Jason:
[28:49] Yeah well you you mentioned up front that the stock the Amazon stock really took a hit after the earnings and it feels like that was two things.
Their guidance that we’ll talk about in a minute but also.
I think the street was really spooked by the kind of slowing rate of growth of AWS you know for a long time a device has been the crown jewel of Amazon.
In terms of you know a big Revenue number that’s growing super fast and is wildly profitable,
so AWS sales for the quarter where twenty point five billion which is a big number that’s up 27 percent or 20 percent of you adjust for currency which again.
Like.
In most cases you go to someone and say hey you’ve got a highly profitable twenty billion dollar quarter business in a grew by 27 percent this year from last year how do you feel about that,
you feel pretty good but wall Street’s expectations were that they would grow by more than 32 percent.
And so it was like a significant Miss and if you know you look at the recent history of growth of AWS I mean you go back to 2021 it was.
Thirty-seven percent growth 39 percent growth 40% growth 3733 and now 28 this is the first time it’s dropped into the 20s and so I think there’s a real fear on the part of investors that like.
[30:11] Is the law of large numbers finally starting to catch up with this business and do you know do investors have to reset expectations about.
What a WS can contribute to the pot going forward.
Scot:
[30:25] You lot of people have been predicting a slow down there because of the larger law of large numbers but it’s always sad when it happens.
Jason:
[30:32] Yeah yeah and I don’t know what the answer is because I’m on one hand it seems totally intuitive that it would slow down it’s such a big business.
That there is a strong argument that as much money as that generates it is shocking what a small percentage of the world’s compute is.
Cloud still and so it doesn’t there it’s easy to craft an argument.
That we’re still in the first inning of the world migrating to the cloud and so a hypothesis is not that like.
The fast run rate for these cloud services is over but that businesses spending to move to the cloud has slowed down because of the economy right and that you know as as.
The there’s more economic dark clouds you know Amazon has certainly cut back and and tried to contain cost every other company in the world is doing that and often that means,
that migration to the cloud project that they were planning you know has to take a backseat so so some of that could be in there as well.
Scot:
[31:35] Yeah and I saw.
In the called excited energy cost so AWS also had some pressure on the bottom line and they cited energy cost and then I got to imagine this European recession you know the a lot of the
the energy around a WS comes from startups and startup formation as always.
Low during recessionary period step yes so if we do get a global recession it’s going to be under pressure but I think the long-term addressable market for it’s just massive so we’ll see.
Jason:
[32:06] Exactly but the good news for Amazon is they secretly have a better business than in the US
which which is the bloody ads business right and so we’ve talked about this for a couple quarters you know this used to be buried and other that you know a couple of quarters ago they had to disclose it for the first time.
Um and you know so it was another good quarter.
For the ads business it grew 25% 30% of you adjust for currency.
So they sold 9.5 billion dollars worth of ads this quarter.
Which is not as big as a WS but the margins for ads are way better than the margins for AWS because you mentioned you know the cost of goods for an ad is essentially zero.
But there’s very expensive electricity required for each unit of compute that a WS cells.
So you add up the last four quarters of the ads business and it’s now a 36 billion dollar business.
[33:11] Which is another remarkable business I’ve done the math of a foreign of you kind of you know impute income from from AWS and ads ads has already surpassed AWS in terms of total.
Income contribution.
One slight wrinkle for our listeners in the world of retail and commerce right now like one of the top topics that keeps coming up over and over again as retail media networks every,
every retailer has seen this Amazon business and they’re launching their own version of it call the retail media Network and investing heavily in it.
And every brand is struggling with how to deal with all these retail media networks and if they’re a good investment and how to deal with them so that.
It’s a huge topic right now and I would just point out that well.
[34:02] The bulk of Amazon’s ad business is a retail media Network Amazon is bigger than a retailer right and so.
The ads Revenue the Amazons talking about does include.
Thursday night football and Lord of the Rings and you know at which in a lot of other things that Target does not have right so I just.
Want to remind people that it’s not really apples-to-apples to compare.
You know Amazon’s you know kind of 40 billion dollar annualized run rate against.
You know and say that gosh if if they’re getting you know this many dollars per.
/ retail gmv dollar than everyone else should be getting the same because it’s not really Apples to Apples.
Scot:
[34:54] On the Amazon ads I saw this interesting article was titled Google’s pain is Amazon’s gaining which I thought was cute and it talked about how if you annualize that
you know this is a 40 billion dollar line for Amazon which makes it a third the size of Facebook now
and a sixth the size of Google so we’ve we’ve we’ve on the show we’ve been talking about this and I remember when it passed Snapchat and then Twitter so it’s really there’s a day where it could close in on Facebook because
it’s,
the Amazon site is growing very rapidly Facebook seems kind of lost in the jungle focused on virtual reality and not fixing their core business so those lines could cross pretty quickly which would
give us this new duopoly of Google and Amazon as which three years ago if we had said that people would have thought were crazy.
You think we’re crazy but yeah it’s crazy.
Jason:
[35:48] It totally could I would say one caveat here there is a big difference at the moment between Amazon’s ad business and like meta and Google’s ad business.
The Amazon still gets a lot of traffic by buying ads on Google,
so you know that that the other big ad platforms are all organically earning their traffic and then they’re monetizing it
Amazon does kind of by eyeballs at wholesale from Google and then sell them retail to two brands on Amazon so there is a bit of Arbitrage that’s happening there now as they create more,
loyal Amazon Prime customers and more you know viewers of all their Entertainment Properties that you know it’ll be more apples to apples but and I haven’t looked this quarter but last quarter
you know they you know on a or a quarter ago it on an annual basis they spent about 17 billion dollars on ads so.
The the bottle out of traffic that they then result.
Scot:
[36:50] Cool so that that kind of wraps up our Q3 highlights so then let’s zoom out and at the top I mentioned you know that Am That Wall Street looks at kind of the current quarter in the future quarter so that was Q3 so it’s kind of a miss and then
the whenever a public company like this updates the current quarter they also update our outlook for the future quarter which in this context would be fourth-quarter calendar fourth quarter
so Amazon guided to 142 148 billion for the quarter so that would imply about it 4.8 percent year over year growth at the midpoint,
now they don’t give us guidance on North America international so there’s imagine inside of there you would still see North America growing.
[37:32] Fifteen to twenty percent and then you know the non North America they called the non-domestic business having a headwind and that’s where you get this 4.8 would be the Delta there.
But what’s really bad about that is Wall Street prior to this report had thought they would do 155 billion so let me say those numbers
clearly Wall Street thought that Amazon would do 155 billion in
in fourth quarter and now they’re saying basically 144 so so that was a pretty big lowering of expectations and then also on the bottom line Wall Street thought that would do five billion of operating income and Amazon said well 024 the midpoints to that’s a change of three billion dollars so
Wall Street didn’t like that but you know if you’re
if you’re you know jassy and you’re running this thing you want to lower expectations because it makes it easier to beat them in the long run if you part of the Amazons DNA is to be a much longer thinking kind of company so you,
typically if that’s how you think you’ll take some short-term pain for long-term gain so you know some folks feel like,
maybe the kitchen sink this thing and they knew third quarter wasn’t going to meet what everyone wanted say thought this is a great time to go ahead and rip the Band-Aid off and really lower into the fourth quarter other people look at that body language like I mentioned and they say wow.
[38:48] You know it maybe it got worse especially in Europe in the fourth quarter and maybe that’s what caused them to really kind of Ratchet this down we won’t sadly we won’t know until January February when they release their results but
you can count on us here at the Jason Scott show we’re going to be tracking the holiday we have some really great content planned for you this is when we kick into overdrive and really
track things going on so we have a lot of content there but it’s not a great set up heading into the holiday would you agree with that Jason.
Jason:
[39:15] Yeah I definitely think this is a strong warning sign for people that are bullish on the the holiday,
I do you know kind of overall I looked at this whole thing and I say you know as an interesting earnings call.
Not a heck of a lot in this earnings call was.
A result of internal stuff going on in Amazon that like it very much reflects the macroeconomic trends that.
That are happening to Amazon and those same macroeconomic trends of course.
Happened to everyone else as well so it’s interesting you know Amazon has become a very useful sort of.
Indicator for where the economy is going and you know the economists have been arguing quite a bit about where it’s going so it’s interesting to see some data.
[40:14] Yeah so this is where we will leave it today if this was valuable for you we certainly would love it if you jump on.
To iTunes and leave us that five-star review make sure you’ve got your podcast player dialed in to download our new episodes because you’re not going to want to miss.
Some of the the play-by-play of holiday.
Scot:
[40:39] Thanks for joining us everyone we hope all of your holiday Q4 results exceed your expectations and.
Jason:
[40:46] Until next time happy Commercing.
