Amazon Reports A Hot Quarter But Kindle Battle A Mystery

Wednesday, April 28, 2010 - 09:42 by Paul Tissington

Amazon.com is certainly firing on all cylinders at the moment. The successful online store, which deals in everything from toys and games to household items and books, has always been rather successful in the e-commerce market. But with the release of Amazon.com's performance results for the first quarter of this year, Amazon has again proved its dominance and ability to further gain market share in the safe shopping online market.

Net income at Amazon.com in the first quarter was reported as being $299 million. This was in comparison with last year's total of $177 million during the first quarter. As a result, Amazon.com was able to claim an impressive 68 per cent growth in earnings over the first quarter period. Revenue grew to $7.13 billion, a rise of 46% and many experts from US firms such as Kaufman Bros hailed the company's first quarter performance as strong, with expectations being high heading into the quarter.

One thing that will be interesting to watch going forward is the continuing battle between Amazon's own e-reader, the Kindle and Apple's variant on the e-reader, the iPad. The iPad has initially been successful, with many keen to understand how Amazon's offering is performing as a result.

Amazon has refused to give specific figures as to how many Kindles it has so far sold-as with previous quarterly reports-but emphasises that there are now a large number of Kindle titles available via Amazon's online store, numbering over 500,000.

Amazon.com also reported gains in its EGM (Electronics & General Merchandise) business, of which sales of Kindle devices would be a part. However, Amazon CFO Tom Szkutak has noted after the quarterly performance announcement that much of the growth in the EGM business came as a result of the Amazon.com acquisition of Zappos, which specialises in safe shopping online for footwear.