Amazon Beats Microsoft In 'The Battle of Seattle' (usatoday.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Yesterday Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos earned $5 billion in one afternoon when the company's stock price jumped 9.6%. Amazon reported an actual profit of $513 million (nearly double the amount expected), and next year Amazon's sales are projected by analysts to be 63% higher than Microsoft's, which USA Today calls "a good illustration of how growth in the sector has moved from hardware, software and chip companies to Internet firms selling goods or advertising online... [W]hile Bill Gates helped put Seattle area on the map as a U.S. tech hub, Bezos now runs the largest tech company in the State of Washington, by far, in terms of sales."

Amazon's Echo and Alexa devices are believed to be outselling their Kindles (and Alexa will soon make her first appearance on a non-Amazon device). But Amazon attributed their surprise jump in revenue to a 51% annual increase in the "tens of millions" of subscribers paying for their Amazon Prime shipping service (which in San Francisco now even includes delivery from restaurants), as well as a 64% increase from their AWS cloud service, which recently announced a new automated security assessment tool.
Amazon ultimately reported more than twice as much new business as Google and three times as much as Facebook, according to USA Today, which notes that now of all the tech companies, only Apple has more revenue than Amazon, and because of the jump in their stock price, Jeff Bezos is now the fourth-richest person in the world. But with all that money floating around, Seattle tech blogger Jeff Reifman is now wondering why Amazon's local home delivery vehicles in Seattle seem to be operating with out of state plates.

Comments

Out of State plates

[bretts]

There's a simple reason: you can keep two cars in a nearby state for less than the cost of one in Seattle. The law says you must keep your car mostly in the home state in order to qualify for residency, so drive it for five months a year in Seattle then take it home and bring the other one back.Either way you come out ahead. It's good business, and as always, business is ahead of government.

Re:Out of State plates

[mschuyler]

Not a real issue. Out of state plates are really not the big deal they used to be when WA had one of the highest yearly excise taxes in America and people would try to get away with licensing their stuff in Oregon where fees were lower. Now they are fairly modest--especially compared to California, which taxes the shit out of vehicles. I used to pay $1,000 a year to license my car here. Now it's about $70 or so. So "tax avoidance" is not the issue here. If the vehicles are leased, that would probably explain it.

Ridiculous fluff

[drawfour]

Ridiculous fluff article. Wal-mart's revenue is more than twice that of Apple's, but no one would claim that Wal-mart is beating Apple.

Microsoft's profit in one quarter is greater than the sum of all profits ever achieved by Amazon through their entire existence. To claim that Amazon has somehow "won" some battle is ridiculous when you're talking about revenue, not profits. They have to do something about their profit margins if they're going to turn revenue into profit...

Re:Ridiculous fluff

[bloodhawk]

sorry my mistake, misread their share price. Regardless you cannot compare shareprices, only morons that don't understand stocks make such idiotic statements. a share in Amazon buys a much larger chunk of the company than a share in MS. To do a comparison you would need to compare about 16 MS shares to 1 Amzn share to be able to attempt to compare share price.

Did OP mean they are biggest employers in Ireland

[postmortem]

Because their US divisions are making a loss year after year, and have no [taxable] income at all