Amazon (AMZN) 2nd Quarter Earnings: What to Expect

While investors may seek more color on U.S. Postal Service shipping costs and the expected impact on the bottom line, Amazon.com (AMZN) still comes out as the best performer in FAANG stocks, gaining over 56% while the broad market has been treading water this year. Amazon’s Q2 earnings release (ER) is later today, so it seems pointless to speculate the actual outcomes. More importantly, in this article, we are interested in the post-earnings price moves in response to most likely outcomes.

Another figure investors love to watch, revenue from Amazon Web Services (AWS), came in at $6.1 billion, up 49 percent year-over-year. Analysts surveyed by FactSet were expecting AWS revenue of $6 billion.

As the high-margin cloud computing business arm of the company, AWS essentially helps finance all the rest of Amazon's low-margin retail endeavors, and is largely responsible for the massive gains in the Amazon stock price over the past few years.

In the three months that ended June, the Seattle-based company is expected to earn earn $2.50 per share on revenue of $53.38 billion. This compares to the year-ago quarter when earnings came to 40 cents per share on revenue of $37.95 billion. For the full year, ending in December, EPS is expected to rise 175% year over year to $12.56 per share, while full year revenue of $237.34 billion would rise 33.4% year over year.