Amazon sells 2.5 million Harry Potters
PrintNo magical effect on profits though
Posted in Financial News, 24th October 2007 09:53 GMT
Free whitepaper – Thermal design of Dell PowerEdge server
Amazon beat the Street's expectations for its third quarter but still seemed to disappoint traders yesterday. Shares fell sharply in after-hours trading after rising more than ten per cent during the day.
The bookseller also showed exactly how low-margin a low-margin web business can be. Despite turnover of more than $3bn the company made just $80m in profit.
Net sales for the quarter ended 30 September 2007 grew 41 per cent to $3.26bn and net profit was up 313 per cent to $80m.
The biggest release of the year was the latest and last Harry Potter tome - Amazon sold 2.5m copies of the book.
International sales from Germany, Japan, France, China and the UK were $1.47bn, up 40 per cent on the same period of 2006. US sales were up by a similar amount, 42 per cent, to $1.79bn.
Amazon said over 290,000 developers have now signed up to use Amazon Web Services, up 25,000 from the previous quarter. ®
Analyst Keynote: The Register Agile Data Center Summit
10 Steps to a Successful CRM Implementation
Market Primer: ERP Systems
What Exchange can't do - and Dell can
Enabling The Agile Data Center
Dirty, dirty PCs: The X-rated picture guide
Top 500 supers - rise of the Linux quad-cores
Early adopters bloodied by Ubuntu's Karmic Koala
Sign up, sign up for The Register IT security newsletter