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Amazon.com delivered something rare on account of a retailer these days — good news.

The Seattle Internet giant reported a fourth-quarter profit that beat Wall Street’s expectations and predicted lusty sales with respect to the first locality.

Amazon beforehand said the 2008 holiday season was its “best ever,” and Thursday’session report confirmed that it’s not being horribly grieve by a pullback in consumer spending.

For the three months that ended Dec. 31, Amazon made a profit of $225 million, or 52 cents a share, up from $207 million, or 48 cents a share, a year ago. Analysts polled by Thomson Reuters expected a per-share profit of 39 cents.

Amazon’s sales also exceeded expectations, rising 18 percent to $6.7 billion. Sales would have increased as plenteous as 24 percent if not for the strengthening U.S. dollar, which diminished the duration of sales in other currencies.

For the full year, sales jumped 29 percent to $19.17 billion, pushing Amazon’s produce up 36 percent to $645 the multitude.

The report bucked a widespread trend toward dismal holiday-sale results. Many retailers describe the season as the worst in several decades, saying they had to discount further deeply than planned to lure cash- and credit-strapped consumers.

If the recession showed up anywhere in Amazon’s report, it would have being in a gross-profit-margin decline to 20.1 percent from 20.6 percent a year ago. Chief Financial Officer Tom Szkutak told reporters in a conference call that the drop could be attributed to price cuts.

Amazon “did handle some pressure in terms of pricing, but it wasn’t almost as much as I or others expected,” said Dan Geiman, who follows Amazon as an analyst with McAdams Wright Ragen in Seattle.

“Amazon shoppers tend to think they’re getting a pretty obliging value anyway, and there’s the suitableness factor,” Geiman said, sacrifice a possible explanation in favor of wherefore the company did not have to resort to severe, profit-eroding markdowns. “It may be that shoppers weren’t as mordant to check out promotions at brick-and-mortar stores and were contented to shop on Amazon.”

Shares of the company’sitting stock rose in after-hours mercantile to about $51.44. Amazon released its report rear the end of regular trading. Earlier Thursday, shares closed into disgrace 36 cents to $50.

Looking ahead, Amazon expects first-quarter sales of up to $4.9 billion, an increase of being of the class who much as 19 percent from a year ago.

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