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Amazon earnings: revenues continue to grow, but profits prove elusive

Amazon earnings: revenues continue to grow, but profits prove elusive

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amazon jeff bezos stock 640
amazon jeff bezos stock 640

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has long told his investors that the focus of the company is on growing its business and hunting for big new opportunities, not turning a massive profit. The company reported its first quarter 2013 earnings today, and this trend continued.

The company posted revenues of $16.07 billion for the first quarter, a 22 percent increase over the same period last year. But its profit dipped to $82 million, as compared to $130 million in the first quarter of 2012. Its earnings per share, however, were better than Wall Street expected, coming in at $.18 cents a share.

Part of the reason Amazon's profits are so small is that the company invests heavily in new markets, as well as research and development. It has transitioned from being an e-commerce company to having its own line of e-book readers, tablets, and is rumored to be working on a phone and TV set-top box.

Amazon wants to be a complete ecosystem that sells you physical goods and digital media, as well as the devices that media runs on. It's also dipping its toes into the original content game, although so far its web series have been less than stellar.

On a conference call, CFO Tom Szkutak dodged questions about a potential phone or set-top box, quoting "a long-standing practice of not talking about anything that we might do or not do" with regards to the company's product roadmap. He also said that there was "nothing to announce" about a potential expansion of AmazonFresh, the company's grocery arm, in response to a question about new refrigeration units that Amazon is allegedly adding outside its Seattle test market.