Billions For Amazon’s 1Q

Riding first-quarter sales that surpassed $3 billion for the first
time, Amazon today reported $111 million in 2007 first-quarter
profits, a 115 percent jump over 2006 first-quarter profits of $51
million. The news fared well for the company in after-hours trading.

Revenues increased 32 percent in the first quarter to $3.02 billion,
compared to $2.28 billion in the first quarter of 2006, CFO Tom Szkutak said on an investor’s conference call this afternoon.

Revenues for the second quarter should fall between
$2.7 billion and $2.85 billion, growing between 26 percent and 33
percent compared with second quarter 2006, Szkutak said.

He put 2007 full-year
revenues somewhere between $13.4 billion and $14 billion, or to
grow between 25 percent and 31 percent compared with 2006.

“We’re pleased with our overall strong growth and especially with the
number of people joining Amazon Prime,” Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO
of Amazon.com, said in a statement. Amazon Prime is a membership
program, introduced in Feb. 2005.

Without offering specific numbers, Szkutak also expressed optimism
for Amazon’s computer infrastructure services, such as the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

Bezos sounded a similar note at the Web 2.0 Expo in
San Francisco earlier this month. A Web startup typically spends 70 percent of its energy on back-end considerations, such as buying servers and negotiating Internet service contracts.

But EC2, Bezos argued, is a more cost-effective
alternative for computing and storage.

In after-hours trading, Amazon’s share price jumped 11.7 percent to $50.02.

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