AMZN - Amazon.com, Inc.
2,473.00 +0.59 (0.02%)
After hours: 7:59PM EDT
| Previous close | 2,471.04 |
| Open | 2,467.00 |
| Bid | 2,470.70 x 1800 |
| Ask | 2,475.00 x 1200 |
| Day's range | 2,445.31 - 2,473.50 |
| 52-week range | 1,626.03 - 2,525.45 |
| Volume | 2,256,723 |
| Avg. volume | 5,887,836 |
| Market cap | 1.233T |
| Beta (5Y monthly) | 1.35 |
| PE ratio (TTM) | 118.09 |
| EPS (TTM) | N/A |
| Earnings date | N/A |
| Forward dividend & yield | N/A (N/A) |
| Ex-dividend date | N/A |
| 1y target est | N/A |
- Yahoo Finance
Netflix, Disney join other big brands in support of George Floyd protests on 'Blackout Tuesday'
Hollywood is voicing its support for the Black Lives Matter movement amid ongoing protests over the death of George Floyd.
- Bloomberg
Zoom Transforms Hype Into Huge Jump in Sales, Customers
(Bloomberg) -- Zoom Video Communications Inc. reported quarterly sales that leapfrogged estimates, showing that a surge in demand for its video-conference service during the coronavirus pandemic has translated into more paying customers. The company also about doubled its annual revenue forecast.Revenue increased about 170% to $328.2 million in the period that ended April 30, the San Jose, California-based company said Tuesday in a statement. Analysts, on average, expected $203 million, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Profit, excluding some items, was 20 cents a share, compared with analysts’ average projection of 9 cents.Zoom projected sales of as much as $1.8 billion in the fiscal year, from a forecast of as much as $915 million in early March. Analysts estimated $930.8 million.Chief Executive Officer Eric Yuan has tried to ensure that his virtual-meeting platform can cope with a swell of demand from people forced to remain home to prevent the spread of Covid-19. While security and privacy issues plagued the system early in the quarantine, Zoom has become an essential social network, attracting more than 300 million participants some days, up from 10 million in December. The software maker allows gatherings of as long as 40 minutes for no charge. While Zoom has attracted more buzz than corporate rivals, its ability to attract more paying customers will determine how well it’s faring against competition from Microsoft Corp., Cisco Systems Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google.Shares increased 4% in extended trading after closing at a record $208.08 in New York. The stock has more than tripled this year.Zoom said it ended the quarter with about 265,400 customers with more than 10 employees, a more than fourfold increase from the same period a year earlier. The company now has 769 corporate clients that have spent more than $100,000 on Zoom’s products over the last 12 months, about double from a year earlier.The company said its expects adjusted profit in the fiscal year will be $355 million to $380 million, or $1.21 to $1.29 a share. Analysts had estimated 46 cents, just more than Zoom’s earlier forecast. The company has been spending to bolster its network capacity, including by buying cloud-computing services from Oracle Corp. during the pandemic. Zoom also continues to use Amazon.com Inc.’s cloud service.With Zoom’s popularity has come controversy over the company’s security practices. Trolls have invaded myriad meetings, religious gatherings and other events, to share pornography and shout profanity or racial epithets, in a phenomenon known as “Zoombombing.” The company highlighted or created a raft of tools users can employ to prevent the virtual attacks, including passwords and waiting rooms.There also were instances when Zoom calls were routed through servers in China even when no participant was based there and users were unwittingly sending metadata to Facebook Inc. when they signed in. Zoom put an end to both practices. The company pledged to commit to bolstering privacy over all other concerns for three months, purchasing a secure-messaging company, Keybase, to bring the highest standard of encryption to the platform, and hiring cybersecurity experts to guide safety efforts.(Updates with profit forecast in the seventh paragraph.)For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2020 Bloomberg L.P.
- Bloomberg
Amazon Delivery Drivers Say They Fear Becoming Target of Looters
(Bloomberg) -- An Amazon.com Inc. delivery driver in Long Island, New York, was told to abandon his van and call 911 in the event of looting and avoid “high crime” areas. A driver in Chicago encountered a heavy police presence and road closures. In Washington, another driver canceled his shifts for the week after seeing video of an Amazon van in Santa Monica, California, being looted in broad daylight.The thousands of drivers who deliver Amazon packages around the U.S. are adjusting to civil unrest that has prompted curfews and road closures aimed at quelling riots and looting. It’s the latest test of a decentralized delivery machine made up of companies that hire people to drive blue Amazon-branded vans and independent drivers who use their own vehicles. Already worried about avoiding exposure to Covid-19, many drivers must weigh the risks of navigating around the unrest.“I usually get about $100 for a four-hour shift, and that’s just not worth getting my car trashed,” said one Amazon delivery driver in Chicago who uses his own car. “I feel like I have a target on my back.”He carries a pocket knife for protection and has been trying to avoid routes in the city, but the unrest is spreading to the suburbs. Another Chicago driver said many of his colleagues are declining shifts due to safety concerns.The unrest in urban areas is largely affecting grocery delivery, according to several people interviewed for this story. Many drivers in big cities shifted to delivering groceries due to a surge in demand tied to the pandemic. Amazon entices them with better pay to pick up different types of shifts in different areas to match delivery capacity with demand.But the company has boarded up at least one Whole Foods store and is closing others earlier than usual to comply with curfews. Amazon offered some deliveries up until midnight, so the drivers willing to work are noticing fewer shifts due to curfews.Amazon declined to say which cities are affected or how many Whole Foods locations it has shuttered. Deliveries in some urban areas continue after curfew when deemed safe, the company said in an emailed statement.“Nothing is more important than the safety of our employees and partners” an Amazon spokeswoman said. “We are monitoring the situation closely and have adjusted routes or scaled back typical delivery operations in the affected areas to ensure the safety of our teams.”Amazon has a small team of approximately 100 people based in Tempe, Arizona, to manage fast-delivery services such as Prime Now, Amazon Fresh and delivery from Whole Foods, according to a person familiar with the matter. The team is too small to handle the current situation and could halt deliveries in certain areas, said the person, who requested anonymity because he’s not authorized to discuss the details.One driver who works for an independent contractor in Long Island said he received the following instructions if the van is being looted: Don’t try to prevent it, and if you’re surrounded, call 911 immediately. The driver said the company isn’t making some deliveries in certain areas.A driver in Washington, who uses in his own car, said he canceled all of his shifts this week after seeing video of the van being looted in Santa Monica. He wears a vest and puts an Amazon decal on his car so people know who he is when he approaches their home, and he fears that will make him a target. Amazon drivers have been sharing their fears in chat rooms where they discuss tricks of the trade.“People are scared,” he said. “You’re out there in a vest with a car full of packages, so you feel like a target. That video scared a lot of people.”(Updated with company comment.)For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2020 Bloomberg L.P.
- Motley Fool
Will Microsoft Be a $2 Trillion Stock?
Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) is the odds-on favorite to be the first company to cross the $2 trillion market cap threshold according to Wells Fargo Securities analyst Philip Winslow, citing strong growth in Microsoft's Azure cloud computing business.
- Motley Fool
Apple Slashes Prices in China Ahead of a Major Online Shopping Festival
Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) isn't taking any chances when it comes to its ongoing recovery in China, its second-largest market. The company has taken the unusual step of offering steep discounts on its current iPhone models in the Middle Kingdom ahead of a major online shopping event -- the 6.18 Festival. Each of the latest flagship iPhone models, including the iPhone 11, iPhone 11 Pro, and iPhone 11 Pro Max, have all been discounted by about 15% on Apple's official store on the Alibaba Group's (NYSE: BABA) Tmall e-commerce platform.
- Yahoo Finance
Why looting, protests and COVID-19 haven't pounded the stock market
Here's why stocks continue to be in rally mode despite the horrors sweeping America right now.
- Yahoo Finance
'It's driving up the heat density within data centers:' Why AI and 5G are contributing to climate concerns
The increasing prevalence of artificial intelligence and 5G technology are threatening to drive up energy consumption, putting the technology sector on par with the aviation industry in the amount of CO-2 it releases, according to a leading researcher at Gartner. While data centers, tasked with processing the world’s data, have made significant investments to reduce energy consumption over the last several years, David Cappuccio, Gartner VP of Research, says that dynamic is likely to shift dramatically with the growing use of analytics and machine learning.
- Motley Fool
3 Top Cloud Computing Stocks to Buy in June
Earlier this year, Okta (NASDAQ: OKTA), a cloud identity-management company, released its annual Businesses @ Work report highlighting the trends in cloud applications across its huge customer base. It turns out that focusing on three companies that help make today's cloud software possible -- Okta, MongoDB (NASDAQ: MDB), and Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN) -- is a great way to play this growing trend. Let's look at what these three bring to the table, why they have tremendous long-term potential, and how tech investors should think about becoming shareholders in these exceptional cloud computing enablers.
- Motley Fool
3 International Stocks Whose Products You Will Soon Use
Afterpay, Sea Limited, and Blue Prism might be foreign names to a lot of Americans, but these high-growth stocks are bringing products to our country right now.
- Motley Fool
Why Microsoft and Slack Compete
In this episode of Industry Focus: Tech, Dylan Lewis and Motley Fool contributor Brian Feroldi discuss the competitive dynamics between Slack (NYSE: WORK) and Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) and the enterprise software segment in general. To catch full episodes of all The Motley Fool's free podcasts, check out our podcast center. Dylan Lewis: It's Friday, May, 29th, and we are talking about the ongoing war between Microsoft and Slack.
- Bloomberg
Russia’s Yandex Aims to Double Self-Driving Fleet With Hyundai
(Bloomberg) -- Yandex NV will test a driverless car it developed with Hyundai Motor Co. in Detroit as the Russian technology giant makes plans to approximately double its fleet of self-driving vehicles.Yandex plans to buy 100 of the cars, which are souped-up versions of Hyundai’s Sonata, the company said in a statement on Tuesday. The test-drives, which had been planned around the now-canceled Detroit Auto Show, will commence on public roads in the city once lockdown restrictions are lifted, it said.Yandex and the South Korean company announced their partnership last year, seeking to create both a prototype of a driverless car and an autonomous control system that could be marketed to rival car manufacturers and car-sharing startups. The new, fourth-generation Hyundai model has been tweaked to help the system better detect what’s around the vehicles.The new Sonata has nine sensors, up from six, and has moved the radar system from underneath the bumpers to the roof, improving the system’s ability to distinguish objects around the car. Lidars, laser-based systems for measuring distance from a target, have also been moved to improve visibility. A human driver will be present in the car, but the vehicle should operate autonomously.Yandex operates a taxi service with its autonomous vehicles in the Russian city of Innopolis, though most of its fleet is currently occupied with test runs, which will gradually teach its driving software the skills it needs to react to incidents on the road. The company’s autonomous fleet, which recently exceeded 100 cars, have run 3 million autonomous miles, in cities including Moscow and Tel-Aviv.The road to mass-market robo-taxis has been fraught, with developers burning cash to create cars that can safely operate without a driver and win regulators’ approval. And the Covid-19 pandemic and accompanying lockdowns have hit the industry hard.Read more: The State of the Self-Driving Car Race 2020Competitors including General Motors Co.’s Cruise and Uber Technologies Inc. have cut staff recently, while Ford Motor Co. shifted plans to start self-driving services by a year to 2022. Self-driving trucks startup Starsky Robotics shut down in March with its founder saying that “supervised machine learning doesn’t live up to the hype.”Still, the promise of driverless vehicles and the revolution they could bring to everything from personal transportation to logistics, means the technology is still attracting investors. Amazon.com Inc. is in talks to acquire autonomous vehicle startup Zoox Inc., the Wall Street Journal reported last week. Analysts from Morgan Stanley estimate that Amazon could save $20 billion a year with the technology, which would also allow the e-commerce giant to compete in ride-sharing and food delivery.Read more: Amazon Buying Zoox May Save $20 Billion, Put Tesla on Its HeelsYandex, Russia’s largest internet-search engine and ride-hailing operator, has spent $35 million over the past three years to develop its self-driving cars, using technologies such as machine learning and image recognition from its other businesses.For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2020 Bloomberg L.P.
- Oilprice.com
The Big Tech Company Backing Canada's Oil Sands
Though Big Tech has played a key role in reducing global emissions, it still maintains a complicated relationship with the oil and gas industry
- Bloomberg
Pepper Spray Sales Soar on Amazon
(Bloomberg) -- Amazon.com Inc. shoppers are buying up pepper spray as demonstrations continue around the country and self-defense becomes top-of-mind for some Americans.A $9.48 canister of Sabre “max police strength” pepper spray shot up to the top-selling rank in Amazon’s sports and outdoors category Monday morning, supplanting normal best-sellers such as shorts and t-shirts, according to Marketplace Pulse, which monitors the site. A neck gaiter, which can cover the nose and mouth and became popular during the pandemic, is No. 2.One Amazon shopper named “Bill” left a 5-star review for the pepper spray May 31 and said “Put the cops down when they mess with you.” People are swapping recommendations for self-defense products on social-media platforms like Twitter, where users are posting links to Sabre pepper spray on Amazon.Protests have rocked U.S. cities since the killing in police custody of George Floyd, who was black. The authorities have charged police officer Derek Chauvin with Floyd’s murder. Some demonstrations have turned violent, with businesses looted and buildings and vehicles set ablaze.Sabre, which also makes stun guns and other products used by law enforcement, couldn’t immediately be reached for comment. A customer representative said all company executives were in a meeting. According to customer reviews, the pepper spray can be used for self-defense.An Amazon spokeswoman declined to comment. Amazon became a pipeline for household essentials such as toilet paper and disinfecting wipes for shoppers hunkered down at home to avoid contracting Covid-19. The spike in pepper spray sales shows how protests around the country are influencing consumer demand. Amazon’s best-seller product rankings provide a real-time gauge for sudden swings in consumer demand.(Updated with company’s decline to comment.)For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2020 Bloomberg L.P.
- Motley Fool
Why Facebook Has a Better Shot at E-Commerce This Time
Online shopping is seeing a surge amid the pandemic, presenting Facebook with a big opportunity if it can succeed in a market that has long been out of its reach.
- Motley Fool
Low-Price Retailers Post High Growth
In this episode of MarketFoolery, Chris Hill chats with Fool.com contributor Dan Kline about the latest news from the markets. They look at the retail space and how retail businesses are serving underserved communities.
- Motley Fool
Netflix Makes a Smart Move in Its Quest for 100 Million Subscribers
The streaming giant has come up with a smart promotional plan to lure more subscribers in this fast-growing market.
- Motley Fool
Why Costco Could Be a Loser in the E-Commerce Boom
The warehouse retailer does a lot of things well, but online retail hasn't traditionally been one of them.
- Financial Times
Amazon secures record low borrowing costs
Amazon locked in some of the lowest borrowing costs ever secured in the US corporate bond market on Monday, underscoring the rise of the ecommerce giant during the coronavirus pandemic and the boost the Federal Reserve has provided through its historic interventions. The company raised $10bn in an offering that included three-year notes carrying an interest rate of just 0.4 per cent, according to people briefed on the matter. The interest on the new three-year note was less than two-tenths of a percentage point above the rate investors charged the US government when it issued debt of a similar maturity in May — a stunning turn for a company whose debt was considered junk as recently as 2009.
- Financial Times
Protests in the social media age
The film evidence, shown extensively on news channels at the time of King’s arrest, had a big impact; but the blurred and grainy images and the way they were disseminated bear little resemblance to the HD video of today and the power of the world wildfire web. Smartphones captured the death in police custody of George Floyd last month in distressing detail and the FT View is that the difference from the violent protests of the past “is the immediacy with which camera phones and social media bring home the severity of the unrest — and, at times, enable protests to spread”. This time, tech industry executives and companies, including Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Netflix and Twitter, have expressed their support for antiracism and criminal justice campaigns, through messages to employees, on their homepages or through official social media accounts.
- TechCrunch
India rejects Walmart-owned Flipkart's proposed foray into food retail business
The Indian government has rejected Flipkart’s proposal to enter the food retail business in a setback for Walmart, which owns a majority of the Indian e-commerce firm and which recently counted its business in Asia’s third-largest economy as one of the worst impacted by the global coronavirus pandemic. The Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT), a wing of the nation's Ministry of Commerce and Industry, told Flipkart, which competes with Amazon India, that its proposed plan to enter the food retail business does not comply with regulatory guidelines -- though it did not elaborate, according to a person familiar with the matter. Rajneesh Kumar, chief corporate affairs officer at Flipkart, told TechCrunch that the company was evaluating the agency's response and intended to re-apply.
- Yahoo Finance
Looting at Macy's, Target and other retailers is just one reason to avoid retail stocks
Retail is in a brutal spot right now.
- Motley Fool
Amazon Offering Emergency Daycare for Employees Until October
Amazon said it will cover 90% of the cost for ten days of emergency child or adult care for its 650,000 U.S. employees.
- Motley Fool
Peloton's Work Out App Now Available Through Apple TV
Peloton is capitalizing on skyrocketing usage during the pandemic, expanding access to its workout app.
