Amazon Beats Big on Q4 Bottom Line; Plus V, AMGN

Amazon AMZN shares climbed more than 13% immediately following its Q4 2019 earnings release, whereby earnings per share blew away estimates -- $6.47 per share versus $3.98 expected, on $87.44 billion in revenues than outpaced the $86.00 billion anticipated. Expectations for Q4 earnings were on the low side, both at Zacks and on the street, so take this giant bottom-line beat with a grain of salt.

Guidance for Q1 revenues were a range of $69 billion to $73 billion, which puts the current Zacks consensus on $71.34 squarely in the middle. North America revenues reached $53.7 billion, while AWS outperformed expectations to $9.95 billion for the quarter. Online sales grew 15% in the all-important holiday shopping season. Also, consider that Amazon had been the worst-performing of the Big Tech players of late, trading down year to date until today's after market.

Visa V met earnings projections of $1.46 per share on $6.05 billion in quarterly revenues, which was a smidge below forecasts. The company's Q1 Payments Volume grew 8% year over year, and it has announced a $9.5 billion share buyback program. That said, Visa shares are down more than 1% in late trading Thursday; not only did the credit card giant post a slight sales miss, but this is a company that has never once posted a negative earnings surprise -- so just meeting estimates must feel a bit strange. For more on V's earnings, click here.

Biotech major Amgen AMGN, however, posted better-than-expected results on both top and bottom lines Thursday afternoon -- $3.64 per share easily surpassed the $3.47 expected and the $3.42 per share from the year-ago quarter, and revenues of $6.2 billion pushed comfortably above expectations of $6.01 billion. Full-year 2020 guidance also moved higher than the initial Zacks consensus figures: $14.85 - 15.60 is now expected for full-year earnings on sales of between $25 - 25.6 billion, as opposed to the $14.63 and $23.18 billion analysts were looking for, respectively. Yet shares are down 2.7% in the late session, and down year to date.

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Click to get this free report Amazon.com, Inc. (AMZN) : Free Stock Analysis Report Amgen Inc. (AMGN) : Free Stock Analysis Report Visa Inc. (V) : Free Stock Analysis Report To read this article on Zacks.com click here. Zacks Investment Research