[HN Gopher] Amazon Q1/2022 [pdf]
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Amazon Q1/2022 [pdf]
Author : ckastner
Score : 56 points
Date : 2022-04-28 20:07 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (s2.q4cdn.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (s2.q4cdn.com)
| endisneigh wrote:
| Feels like the tech bubble is bursting haha. Big co seems to be
| relatively safe but so many others are down 50%+ YTD.
|
| Robinhood, Wish, Peloton, Affirm, Opendoor, Roku, etc. etc.
| gitfan86 wrote:
| TDOC,COIN,RIVN. Yes this seems like a good thing. The multiples
| are getting more realistic
| rvz wrote:
| Indeed it is. More like the _Big Tech Crash of 2022._
| qgin wrote:
| AMZN p/s is less than half of MCD
| reducesuffering wrote:
| P/S is almost never a comparable metric when margins like
| Amazon retail can be like 5%. AMZN p/s is also 4x Walmart.
| recuter wrote:
| Bezos retired less than a year ago.
|
| Circa 2017 he owned 20% of AMZN. Presently he owns 10%. Back in
| 1997 he owed 42%.
|
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/rachelsandler/2021/06/24/heres-...
| xxpor wrote:
| There might have been a major personal life event in there....
| chollida1 wrote:
| I see he owns 49,927,744 shares as of march 2nd for an
| ownership of 9.82%.
| arberx wrote:
| They guided lower: key take away
| ArtWomb wrote:
| AWS Rev $18.44B, ~3-4x GCloud, wow. Just got invite to re:MARS AI
| & Space conf, Jun 24 las vegas ;)
|
| https://remars.amazonevents.com/
| [deleted]
| StratusBen wrote:
| Not only is it that high it's growing 37% year-over-year!
| Really insane to see a business this large growing that
| quickly. Still very much the early days of cloud infrastructure
| adoption.
| Weryj wrote:
| As a recently departed employee. This section was a complete
| joke. "Investing in Employees and Our Workplace".
|
| "These mental health benefits enhance existing benefits, which
| include 24/7 access to free, one-on-one counseling sessions,
| suicide prevention resources, and customized support." And by
| that they mean those terrible app based counselling services.
|
| The best thing they did do was a free Headspace subscription, but
| they cancelled it after 2 months.
|
| Edit: I just wanted to add one more thing, since I was working in
| Canada my salary was half that of an American, but baselined
| against the same people in Seattle. If I'm working at your high
| American bar, I want your salary. Salt in the wound.
| amazonthrow1231 wrote:
| Amazon is a large company. Experiences are going to vary
| widely.
|
| I work maybe 2 hours a day. Oncall is pretty light when I do
| have it. Fulfilling team and projects with great career
| opportunities. I have no meetings Wed-Fri. I have under 3 years
| of experience and my compensation this year after reviews went
| from:
|
| 164K base -> 218K base Total compensation: 220K for 2021
| calendar year -> 305K for 2022 calendar year -> 378K for 2023
| calendar year
|
| I'm pretty happy as an employee personally though I realize not
| everyone is.
|
| Edit: Some commentators seem to be implying that I'm chasing
| money and bringing down the culture of Amazon by not working
| more - that seems ironic to me given Amazon has historically
| been criticized for its sweatshop reputation.
|
| To clarify, I work 2 hours a week because that's all I need to
| work to deliver my projects on time and I was rated TT this
| year - so why would I work more?
| jerglingu wrote:
| This is a sentiment and self indulgent bragpost straight out
| of the Blind app. To others on the outside looking in: while
| there are corners of Amazon where it's possible to coast, a
| huge amount of people are grinded to pieces and operate at
| such a level of anxiety that they feel it's necessary to
| commit code and manage tickets during nights and weekends to
| keep pace.
| Kranar wrote:
| I am happy to hear the other side of it. It feels like only
| the people who have an axe to grind are allowed to vent on
| HN about their anecdotal experiences, and it's considered
| taboo to share successes.
| ignoramous wrote:
| Won't be surprised if it's satire.
| weakfish wrote:
| Yeah, I wonder how the warehouse employees are faring.
| endisneigh wrote:
| who does all of the actual work if you're only working 2
| hours a day?
| [deleted]
| foobarian wrote:
| He/she is probably a 10x engineer which means they get 20
| effective hours of work done per day.
| mk89 wrote:
| The parent commenter, probably :)
|
| Jokes aside, ... it's not uncommon in (such) large
| organizations to be in the lucky team and that's it. With
| all these people leaving, managers know how much you
| actually work, but it's a win win. If the guy works 2 hours
| a day but he is not a troublemaker, keep him. Hiring
| someone better has become harder.
| reducesuffering wrote:
| Yes, that's why we generally disregard anecdotes and look at
| data:
|
| https://www.teamblind.com/company/Amazon/reviews
|
| Amazon has terrible morale overall, with a 2.7 / 5 Work Life
| Balance rating while most comparable companies, Google,
| Microsoft, Apple, Twitter, etc. are averaging like 4 / 5.
| strombofulous wrote:
| I would want to see evidence to show blind is more than
| just a collection of anecdotes before calling it "data". In
| my (anecdotal, lol) experience the people who post on blind
| are a small subset that are way more likely to complain
| about things, sometimes unreasonably.
| reducesuffering wrote:
| How is that "small subset" not normalized across all
| companies, making an equal comparison? You can make a
| reasonable case that Blind reviews across all companies
| are worse than the average inside the companies, but it
| wouldn't explain why some companies are so much worse
| than others.
| strombofulous wrote:
| Why can you assume it's normalized across all companies?
| reducesuffering wrote:
| What feasible reason would cause you to believe two
| companies' internal morale are the same, even though only
| one of them has disproportionately negative reviews?
|
| Feel free to only visit 2.5 star restaurants on Yelp
| because clearly that must just be disgruntled people
| disproportionately for no reason.
| Weryj wrote:
| Fair enough, the team I was on is falling apart and even
| mentors are suggesting members transfer away.
|
| I tried to bring up the structural issues of the team, but it
| took someone from another team to set them straight. I had
| already left by then.
| jjulius wrote:
| >I'm pretty lucky* as an employee personally though I realize
| not everyone is.
|
| FTFY.
| lvl102 wrote:
| Wow congrats on making $300K doing nothing!
|
| I realized this is very much the culture in Amazon now.
| Because they're the top paying tech company it attracts
| people who work for money and nothing more. That creates...a
| certain culture.
| nawgz wrote:
| People who pan individuals in a capitalist society for
| taking high-paying jobs make no sense to me. You assume
| people that like to have financial security have what
| culture about them exactly? Pragmatism? Realism?
| mataug wrote:
| > Because they're the top paying tech company it attracts
| people who work for money and nothing more. That
| creates...a certain culture.
|
| Are you suggesting that because the pay is high the culture
| of Amazon is bad ?
|
| Why is working for money a bad thing ? Everyone is selling
| their time in exchange for money.
|
| The primary reason for Amazon's bad culture is the
| management, and their insistance on firing 6% of workers
| each year[1]. This creates a culture where the people who
| understand this system well will actively sabotage newbies
| and naive devs to avoid getting canned.
|
| A lucky few with good VPs and directors may have a good
| experience overall, but at some point the Amazon culture
| catches up to everyone, except the executives who don't
| face the same pressures.
|
| [1]https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-performance-
| review-6-...
| lvl102 wrote:
| No that's not my point at all. If you're in that category
| of engineers who basically chase money and work as little
| as you can instead of chasing projects that align with
| your passion, well, Amazon is probably where you will go.
| Once you hit a critical mass of these people, it
| completely sours the culture and it becomes an
| irreversible black hole.
| mataug wrote:
| Life's much more complicated than the binary lens of
| chasing money vs chasing projects.
|
| People change over time, someone might have a family,
| they might encounter a medical situation, they may have
| student loan debt. There are millions of scenarios which
| could cause a person to choose working for a pay bump.
|
| My point is none of these reasons will sour the culture
| as much as management putting employees through a zero
| sum, hunger games like scenario.
|
| At the end of the day all of this stems Bezos's belief
| that employees are all inherently lazy, this trickles
| down to all the executives.
|
| https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-polices-based-
| jeff-be...
| [deleted]
| amazonthrow1231 wrote:
| It's entirely possible to chase both of those things. :)
| lvl102 wrote:
| And of course you can but usually the money just follows
| along. And I've not met a single person in my life who
| works two hours a day on his/her passion. None.
|
| Edit: correction it was two hours per WEEK.
| nawgz wrote:
| Yeah, because most people spend 0 hours a day working on
| their passion, instead exchanging hard time doing an
| activity they hate for too little money.
|
| Working 2 hours a day for a fat paycheck sounds like a
| better way to enable yourself to spend time on your
| passions than deluding yourself into the belief that the
| capitalist entity extracting multiples of your TC as
| value for itself is enabling you to "follow your passion"
| while you work
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| > Because they're the top paying tech company it attracts
| people who work for money and nothing more. That
| creates...a certain culture.
|
| Do you think this is less prevalent at lower labor prices?
| currio wrote:
| > Because they're the top paying tech company it attracts
| people who work for money and nothing more
|
| Thats most (big) tech companies
| lvl102 wrote:
| Amazon is going to rot from the inside by the MBAs they
| hired to run the company instead of engineers.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| having worked there for shy of a year (not in AWS, by
| random placement), i think your verb tense is true but
| misses the fact it long has been rotting.
|
| but they exact a huge "tax" on items sold on the site, so
| they can survive incompetence for quite some time.
| pinkmuffinere wrote:
| Wow, can you say what team/area you're in? Legitimately would
| love to transfer over if i have the right skills -- I'm a sys
| dev engineer at Amazon, but am working long hours, getting
| burned out, and paid way less.
| deskamess wrote:
| Not the poster but no way am I outing my self. This is a
| sacred team you do not talk about.
| paxys wrote:
| It's like a company hanging suicide nets outside their
| buildings and patting themselves on the back for caring about
| employees.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| Foxconn?
| rdtsc wrote:
| It's bad enough that they felt the need to insert a mental
| health line item in the filing. To them it seems "we're so
| nice, let's boast about it" kind of a thing. To me it reads
| like a warning: "you'll need that mental health help if you
| work here".
| bamboozled wrote:
| It's amazing how many people I know avoid using Amazon because
| of how employees are treated, if it didn't treat people so
| badly it would be much more popular. Maybe abusing workers is
| how it became so successful at the scale it is ?
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| There was a "leak" of internal HR documents etc about a year
| ago saying just that. It's on HN somewhere, but how to search
| for it I do not know.
| axg11 wrote:
| Adding a counterpoint here. I work at Amazon and am very happy.
| It's a big company. Team matters. Feel free to AMA if you are
| considering joining.
| chollida1 wrote:
| Numbers:
|
| - Q1 Operating Income 3.7B est 5.42B, wow, that's a big miss
|
| - Q1 Net Sales 116.4B vs Est of 116.43,
|
| - AWS Net $18.4B EST 18.2B
|
| - subscription sales
|
| - operating margin 3.2% vs 4.7Est, that's another big miss
|
| - loss of 7.56/share vs a profit of 15.79/share a year ago, again
| highlights the danger of a very low margin business model that
| makes it up on volume, when all your inputs go up in price.
|
| - their first quarterly loss in 7 years.
|
| - international business was down a fair bit, both in profits and
| sales, This is something to watch as US sales are probably not a
| growth area anymore and bulls were watching this areas
| specifically for growth. Not only fail to grow here but to show a
| loss is concerning.
|
| - their trailing 12M P/E was 124 and their forward 12M P/E is 55,
| so everyone expects far less growth in the future
|
| Notes:
|
| - looks like its the sales forcast that algos seem to hate
|
| - reporting a loss for Q1 and projecting another loss for Q2,
| given that we're long gone from the run at a loss to grow days of
| Amazon, this is something to watch. Maybe people are finally
| starting to buy local again?
|
| - starting to bring down other ecommerce companies which helps
| support the people buying in person thesis some analysts have
| been pushing
|
| - From Bloomberg, Worldwide shipping costs jumped 14% to $19.6
| billion. Meanwhile, revenue from online store sales dropped 3%
| and revenue from third-party sellers services increased 9%.
| Inflation is exposing the dangers of Amazon's low-margin
| e-commerce model that has conditioned customers to expect low
| prices and quick delivery.
|
| - price of a prime membership is going up, probably a good idea,
| i know people who have given up netflix, I know no one who has
| given up a prime membership. Far more value with prime than
| netflix.
|
| - retention of employee's could be interesting to watch as a
| stock that could very likely be worth less in a years time than
| it is now would be a big paycut for alot of devs.
|
| - shares down 10% at one point. Option implied movement is 7.6%
| so this is an oversized move.
|
| - Rivian really boosted amazon last year adding 11.8B to their
| bottom line but the stock forced amazon to take a 7.6B loss on
| Rivian this quarter, so I guess this isn't something to be
| concerned with as this was never real anyway.
|
| - interestingly, the CFO just said they have too many people at
| teh company, though he didn't clarify if it was warehouse or
| developers, I'm guessing its mostly the former and any developer
| head count downsizing will come from employees who leave due to a
| share price that is coming down
| sheepybloke wrote:
| I think the bigger thing is that there is more bad products on
| Amazon now. I've found myself going to Target or other more
| specific stores (e.g. Rei for camping supplies, etc) for goods
| because a lot of the stuff I see on Amazon isn't what I want to
| buy. For example, I was looking for an adapter for my Macbook
| and all the adapters were basically just chinese rebrands of
| the same adapter. I finally gave up and got a Belkin one from
| Best Buy because I couldn't find a comparable thing on Amazon.
| I think this is happening a lot and really hurting them in that
| sector.
| tempnow987 wrote:
| I also went to REI recently, same reason. My wife likes
| target. Both BTW do pickup which gives you a bit of the
| online convenience in my book (target is a big store to grind
| through otherwise).
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I assume Amazon is trying to jettison retail since it is a
| sub 5% profit margin business. A lot of work for not much
| gain.
|
| They would rather be in the AWS/logistics
| platform/music/video business.
| tempnow987 wrote:
| Wow, I had no idea rivian was 172/share / $150B (!!) market
| cap. That's 3x Ford's market cap. Of course now they are in
| $30/share range.
| jjulius wrote:
| >Interestingly, the CFO just said they have too many people at
| the company, though he didn't clarify if it was warehouse or
| developers...
|
| I found one!
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31197990
| booboofixer wrote:
| > Maybe people are finally starting to buy local again?
|
| I'm sorry i dont know how to read these reports, but do they
| have numbers for usage of amazon prime? My guess would be
| people aren't buying local or online, they just aren't buying a
| lot of things anymore because of inflation.
| greatpostman wrote:
| Amazon gave everyone big base raises, pretty clear they knew the
| stock was going down. This company is going to fall on hard
| times, a lot of current employees have not been treated well
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| Employees have not been treated well for a very long time and
| the stock performed just fine then.
| greatpostman wrote:
| They got away with it precisely because the stock was booming
| Barrera wrote:
| From CNBC:
|
| > Growth rates are at their slowest since the dot-com bust in
| 2001.
|
| > The company recorded a $7.6 billion loss on its investment in
| electric vehicle maker Rivian.
|
| > Earnings: $7.38 per share, adjusted, vs. $8.36 expected,
| according to Refinitiv
|
| https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/28/amazon-amzn-q1-2022-earnings...
|
| This is a terrible report for a company of the size and in the
| leading retail position that Amazon is. Amazon has never been a
| company where price to earnings ratios mattered much, but a 12%
| miss is not small potatoes. It bodes very poorly for earnings
| reports from second-tier consumer products companies and
| distributors.
| deskamess wrote:
| Not good for shareholders but AMZN has always reinvested in
| itself at the expense of everyone else. It is the Amazon way.
| xchaotic wrote:
| No longer focused on growth it seems.
| McLaren_Ferrari wrote:
| How can you grow when you sell 500B dollars of products per
| year?
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| expand to the next planet?
| Jayakumark wrote:
| Kind of expected on EPS as Rivian took the hit compared to Last
| quarter.
| qgin wrote:
| Not super rational for market rates act surprised at RIVN
| contribution since the RIVN stock price is available to anyone
| who cares every second of every day. No reason to drop it after
| hours today for that.
| mediaman wrote:
| I think the market is (hopefully) reacting to margins on
| their core retail business, and top-line guidance. RIVN has
| added lots of noise to earnings.
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