Amazon stock plunges as company reports nearly $4B loss | Hacker News Reader

Amazon stock plunges as company reports nearly $4B loss

cnn.com

56 pointsttyp332 comments

All I know is that the cost of Prime keeps increasing, the video content is lackluster, and the last six (!!) things I ordered they either sent the wrong thing, the order was lost in transit, or the item that arrived was clearly counterfeit junk. I live in rural America where retail is essentially dead, but the internet is a big place and I'd rather pay a bit more and know what I'm getting rather than the roulette wheel that Amazon has become for so many items.

For a while Amazon simply hasn't been able to get me items when they say they will with the delay being in the Amazon system before they hand it off to the USPS.

It's strange they can't deliver correctly anymore.

I find it interesting that your packages are still being handed off to the USPS. It has been quite a while since I had an Amazon order not delivered by Amazon.

You live in a larger city or near a larger city most likely.

I often get packages with damaged boxes, or the books (bought new) dented or just quite destroyed (spine bent, etc).

I can't tell if it's their shipping service or other services they use, but almost every single book I order is partially destroyed (as a lover of real physical books and how much I care for pristine books, this really breaks my heart).

Same here, we had to stop buying books from Amazon because they just get destroyed in a way too large box (often with other items) and no packing materials to make it secure. Amazon might now be the largest destroyer of books in the world!

I live in Chicago and buy most of my stuff from amazon. Probably 60% of the time if I order in the morning it arrives the same day, 30% it arrives tomorrow, and the rest is 2 day.

> The company attributed the loss largely to a $7.6 billion loss from its investment in electric automaker Rivian Automotive. Rivian, into which Amazon led a $700 million investment in 2019, has seen its stock plummet more than 75% since its blockbuster November 2021 IPO.

Some useful context.

That's part of the story, but far from all of it. Operating cash flow is down. Free cash flow is down. (Net sales are up.)

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0001018724/000101872...

Did I get this right? Amazon spent $700e6 three years ago and are now able to declare a $7.6e9 loss?

> Did I get this right? Amazon spent $700e6 three years ago and are now able to declare a $7.6e9 loss?

Companies prepare different books for the IRS and for investors. Amazon told investors their Rivian stake was worth $15.6bn at the end of last year [1]. They now have to revise that down. For the IRS, they probably held it at cost basis.

[1] https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/0001018724/0... page 44

Well, they no doubt counted it as profit before, so it’s only fitting.

Market value of the Rivian investment would have been public knowledge prior to the earnings announcement, therefore baked into valuation spreadsheets, and so also into the price of AMZN stock.

This is all about Jeff’s feud with Elon right?

Why can Jeff have The Washington Post but Elon can’t have Twitter?

Not comparable! WaPo is an one way media entity, but Twitter is a two way social media platform where users “engage”

In battle, all weapons compare. Now, who picked the gun and who picked the knife?

But the users may be robots?

I used to start most of my online shopping at Amazon, over the years the quality of curation has gotten significantly worse as junk has flooded the platform and “Amazon’s choice” seems like it might as well just be the thing they sell the easiest. The reviews are close to worthless, so the shopping experience is very low signal.

I’ve pretty much stopped buying off of Amazon.

Same. Surprisingly, my replacement 90% of the time is Walmart. Their prices aren’t much different but their site is simpler and I don’t get spammed with unrelated ads when I search and don’t get spammed to join prime.

Lots of minor things. Amazon defaults to the $7.99 shipping instead of free, two-shipping so it’s an extra click each time. Walmart just defaults to free shipping.

Amazon now seems customized to extract rents while Walmart just wants you to buy stuff.

I'm having the same experience with Amazon, as I do with local large eShops. Once they open the gates for anyone to sell on their platform, the slow decline begins.

I don't know why, I guess it is because I am on a VPN, but the process when I want to log in to Amazon is:

Enter username, which takes me to a different screen

Enter password, which takes me to a different screen

Enter password again, along with solving a puzzle where sometimes I can't even tell what the puzzle is asking. But if I do, it takes me to a different screen

Enter a code that is emailed to me asking me to authorize the computer

If I actually get the code in my email and enter the code, the page eventually reloads, and I am allowed to purchase items from Amazon!

I consider this to be a feature, since I want to use Amazon less and at each step I become more likely to wonder if there isn't anywhere else I can purchase the item that I really don't need anyway.

Might be a vpn. This sounds like typical login behavior if there are a lot of requests coming from your ip.

In a few of the financial centres, seemingly led by New York, companies are pressuring mostly reluctant staff to come back in for trumped up reasons that a cynic might boil down to "come back or a bunch of sandwich and coffee shops will fail". It would be ironic if this return was instead undermining much bigger fish.

Clearly the return to work isn't behind all of Amazon's woes, but anecdotally people i know are spending less online in part because: they aren't there to receive items so easily, they waste time in other ways now (idle hands -> more OneClick impulse purchases) and they're feeling the pinch having extra expenses from the commute and lunches near offices all add up.

I ordered a UPS battery the other day and realised i hadn't bought anything from Amazon in two months and I'd barely missed it and seen very few attempts by them to check if they could tempt me back. The shift was dramatic, having averaged weekly Amazon purchases during the pandemic.

In that case, do you still have Amazon Prime? I cancelled my membership to it. I buy something every couple weeks and haven't noticed a difference in delivery times, though they give me long estimates that have been easily beaten.

Earlier discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31197559

That post is based on Q1/2022 earnings press release. Note that that's not an SEC 10-K. I'd favour third-party reports over Amaozon's own nonregulatory PR.

Not sure what you’re talking about. 10-K filings are produced by companies, not by the SEC.

10-Ks are filed with the SEC and must meet SEC filing requirements.

Press releases aren't, and don't (with some very much less stringent exceptions of misleading comments).

they should deal with fake reviews first.

They make a lot of money selling ads so it might be in their best short term interesting to not really worry about that too much since it gives larger sellers and incentive to give Amazon even more money.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/amazons-advertisin...

A lot this loss is due to changes in the value of rivian stock. Should that go back up (which is most likely won't) then it'll trigger a gain and higher EPS during another quarter in terms of GAAP. Of course we're ignoring operating results and cash flows here.

Their business model is being a Trojan horse for China. How long did they think that would last?

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