The Internet heavyweights (eBay, Amazon.com, Overstock.com, Google and Yahoo) are readying their third-quarter earnings reports, and observers will scrutinize their ecommerce and advertising results for the months of July, August, September to try and guess what lies ahead for the upcoming holiday shopping season.
A week ago, Wall Street analyst Sandeep Aggarwal (Collins Stewart LLC) said of eBay in a research note: "We believe that free shipping, TRS, buyer protection, and fee changes will yield positive results." And about Amazon.com, he wrote: "We believe that AMZN's core business benefits from a recovery in E-Commerce but increasing competition from EBAY and mounting competition for Kindle are somewhat concerning." (Link to Internet Large Cap Qtrly Preview in PDF format.)
Colin Sebastian (Lazard Capital Markets LLC) wrote that his research suggests ongoing strong trends at PayPal through 3Q, "with the company's recently launched adaptive payment suite (aka PayPal X) helping to drive penetration among third-party developers," and said he viewed mobile payments and micro-payments as two areas of potential growth.
And yesterday (October 12, 2009), Mark Mahaney (Citigroup Investment Research) wrote that eBay joined the Google Network Partner, with Google displacing Yahoo as the default search provider on eBay's U.S. properties, giving Google "less than a 1% impact on its net revenue and profits - perhaps $70-$90MM in incremental full year net revenue."
Scheduled Q2-2009 Earnings Conference Calls
eBay: October 21, 2009 at 5 pm Eastern (Link)
Amazon.com: October 22, 2009 at 5 pm Eastern (Link)
Google: October 15, 2009 at 4:30 pm Eastern - Note that following the earnings conference call, Google will host an additional question-and-answer session at 6:00 pm Eastern "to provide an opportunity for financial analysts to ask more detailed product and financial questions." (Link)
Overstock.com: yet to be announced (Link)
Yahoo: October 20, 2009 at 5 pm Eastern - Note that Yahoo will be hosting its first analyst day under new management on October 28th. (Link)
