E-commerce giant Amazon.com, Inc.AMZN reported fourth-quarter financial results after market close Thursday. The results showed growth of the AWS cloud business and several hits on Amazon Prime Video helping boost subscriptions.
Analysts weighed in with their takes on the financial results.
The Amazon Analysts: Oppenheimer analyst Jason Helfstein hadan Outperform rating and raisedthe price target from $130 to $135.
Morgan Stanley analyst Brian Nowak hadan Overweight rating and raisedthe price target from $140 to $150.
Needham analyst Laura Martin hada Buy rating and a price target of $120.
Bernstein analyst Mark Shmulik hadan Outperform rating and a price target of $125.
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The Analyst Takeaways:Oppenheimer's Helfstein said the fourth-quarter revenue came in ahead of analysts estimates. Margins improving for the e-commerce business was a key highlight for the analyst. One concern for the analyst wasa potential slowdown in the AWS business.
AWSs two past downturns lasted around one year, but it experienced strong growth post-recovery on increased customer adoption, Helfstein said.
Prime Video content such asThursday Night Football helped boost Prime sign-ups and drove a younger audience to the company, Helfstein added.
Morgan Stanley's Nowak highlighted improved efficiencies for Amazon in the fourth quarter, which ledto a raise in the price target.
Amazon results/guide showed a steep improvement in retail profitability, giving us more confidence in the scale-down efficiencies/profits ahead, Nowak said.
The companys AWS business segment hadnear-term macro uncertainty, according to the analyst.
The analyst notedimprovements were seen in fulfillment costs and shipping costs.
These improvements give us incremental confidence in AMZNs retail earnings power as our 23 retail GAAP EBT estimates increase by around $8 billion.
Nowak said Amazons CEO Andy Jassy commenting on the company's long-term investments and logistics network were positives.
We see this continuing to enable AMZN to develop the next legs of multi-year growth.
Needham's Martin said Amazons product sales hadstagnated and the company was getting help from its cloud and advertising segments to offset the weakness.
We believe AMZNs share price weakness is attributable in part to AMZN failing to pivot to a multi-constituency philosophy, whereby employees, shareholders and consumers are treated equally, Martin said.
The analyst said Amazon was over-indexing its consumers, which leads to operating margins getting hurt. Martin also notedoperating margins for Amazon were around one-third to one-half of what they were when Amazon founder Jeff Bezos was the CEO of the company.
Martin also said Amazon putclients first over shareholders with its AWS business. Jassy said AWS would help clients save money due to economic weakness.
We think this is indicative of AMZNs client-first approach that sacrifices Wall Streets return on capital goals for investors.
Bernstein's Shmulik sawa rocky road forward for Amazons retail business but keptan Outperform rating.
The company still has its challenges were still debating retail margins, content investment levels, the international strategyand where the floor is on AWS, but our conviction level in seeing the OI inflection this year has come up, Shmulik said.
The cloud business grew 20% year-over-year, which shows a slowdown that Shmulik calls mostly self-inflicted with Amazon helping companies.
We remain in the when not an if camp for a 2023 OI inflection.
AMZN Price Action: Amazon shares are down 4.42%$ to $107.92on Friday versus a 52-week price range of $81.43 to $170.83.
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