In just under a week, e-commerce megastar Amazon.com (AMZN -1.07%) stock is scheduled to report its Q1 2024 financial results. Analysts are optimistic, forecasting earnings will nearly triple year over year, to $0.85 per share. But beyond just next week's results, what are the experts saying about Amazon stock?
One analyst in particular, BMO Capital's Brian Pitz, just predicted that within a year, Amazon stock will rise 20% in price, hitting $215 a share.
Is Amazon stock a buy?
He may be right about that. Amazon, as you probably know, is involved in a lot of different businesses. But at the risk of oversimplification, Amazon's two most important businesses are just two: e-commerce, where Amazon collects most of its revenue; and the cloud computing AWS business, where Amazon makes most of its profit.
Last year, Amazon's North American and International retail e-commerce businesses raked in a collective $484 billion in revenue, according to data from S&P Global Market Intelligence -- but actually earned less than $15 billion in profit on that revenue. In contrast, Amazon's much smaller AWS business did a little over $90 billion in sales, but earned profits of just under $25 billion. That's an operating profit margin of 27%.
Why is this important? Heading into earnings day, BMO's Pitz predicts that Amazon's e-commerce business will grow its sales by double digits, helping to unlock "meaningful" free cash flow. That's great, but what's even better is that Pitz sees Amazon's AWS growing not the 14% year over year that he previously predicted, but 15%.
And sure, a 1-percentage-point change in growth rate might not sound like much. But the faster AWS grows its sales (at 27% profit margins versus the 3% margins at the retail business), the better the future will look for Amazon.com stock. It's really as simple as that.
