Best Buy shares are getting a boost this morning from a bullish note by Goldman Sachs analyst Matthew Fassler, who added the stock to his firm’s Conviction List. Fassler had upgraded the stock to a Buy rating in early January. He has a price target on the stock of $33.
Fassler expects the company to benefit from the demise of rival Circuit City.
Virtual worlds have had some real problems. Google, for instance, recently shut down an animated environment called Lively only five months after it was announced. And Linden Lab, whose Second Life online community was once front-page news, has neither reached many mainstream consumers nor created an important meeting place for corporate users.
J.P. Morgan’s Imran Khan theorized in a research note this afternoon that Amazon.com could eventually be a beneficiary of the demise of Circuit City, which earlier today said it would close all of its remaining stores and liquidate. Khan thinks Amazon could inherit as much as half of Circuit City’s online business.
The broad market is getting clobbered this morning in part by the extremely weak Commerce Department report on December retail sales–and investors are demonstrating particular zeal for dumping both Amazon.com and eBay.
The Street is suddenly concerned about pressure on gross margins at Amazon.com. The issue came up in two Street research notes this morning; while in the real world it takes three data points to declare a trend, I’ll settle for two.
It has become popular to say that the gaming industry has become recession-proof, simply because the overall sales for 2008 are up year over year…but those numbers only tell part of the story. Other sources are starting to report some troubling trends in gaming sales; not the least of which is the plummeting price of used games. These trends could lead to some troubling times for gaming in 2009.
Borders Group took itself off of the market yesterday afternoon, presumably because the company could find no buyers. Accordingly, the stock has taken a nosedive. That, combined with dismal recent numbers from Barnes & Noble, has intensified worries about the book-selling business as a whole–and about future numbers from Amazon.com in particular.
Are estimates still too high for Amazon.com (AMZN)?
Barclays Capital analyst Douglas Anmuth thinks so. This morning, he cut his 2008 estimate to $1.40 from $1.56; for 2009, he drops to $1.57, from $2.06. That puts his numbers way below the Street consensus of $1.51 for this year and $1.96 for next year.
Spore, after more than 10 years of development time, is finally available for the PC and Mac. The game comes from the mind of the talented Will Wright, the man who gave us The Sims and the original SimCity titles.
There was a certain irony Monday when Citigroup analyst Mark Mahaney jacked up his sales forecast for the Kindle, the electronic book reader developed by Amazon.com Inc.
Ironic because in Silicon Valley–the capital of early-technology adopters and the bleeding-edge users of all things geek–actual sightings of the device are quite rare.
Amazon.com (AMZN) shares are sharply higher today, aided by a bullish note this morning from Citigroup’s Mark Mahaney focused on the company’s Kindle e-book reader.
Mahaney today doubled his 2008 unit estimate on Kindle sales to 380,000 from 190,000. He notes that 380,000 is exactly how many iPods Apple (AAPL) sold in the first year.
Amazon is expanding its core: the company today announced a deal to acquire AbeBooks, a Victoria, B.C., based online seller of used, rare, and out-of-print books from independent booksellers around the world.
Amazon.com (AMZN) has quietly launched “Checkout by Amazon,” an e-commerce checkout service for online merchants that is taking on eBay’s (EBAY) PayPal Merchant Services offering, several analysts noted today.
If we’re in a recession, you wouldn’t know it from looking at Amazon.com’s (AMZN) June quarter results.
Amazon shares are up sharply in an otherwise ugly market Thursday morning, propelled onward by some gushing post-earnings commentary from the Street. The key point: The company’s revenue in the June quarter actually accelerated from the March quarter, despite a weakening economy.
Earlier this week, the hedge fund manager William Ackman of Pershing Square Capital Management floated the idea that the book retailer Borders Group (BGP) should consider selling itself to Amazon.com (AMZN).
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