PRIME NUMBERS
Amazon, No. 2 market cap, touts ‘record’ day
Amazon boasted that Prime Day 2018 was its best ever — but don’t expect hard evidence to back up the claim in its 1,516-word press release.
This year’s Prime Day came as Amazon is closing in on Apple as the world’s largest company by market cap.
Amazon hit the $900 million mark for the first time earlier Wednesday — nipping at Apple’s heels and its $935 million market cap.
As for Prime Day, Amazon is famously long on hyperbole and short on details, say industry analysts.
“Amazon has mastered the art of giving minimal data while providing a lot of information,” noted Instinet analyst Simeon Siegel.
Case in point: The Seattle-based company disclosed that Whole Foods customers “saved millions of dollars” on Prime Day and that the “best selling deal [there] was organic strawberries.”
Customers also purchased “millions” of Fire TV devices, “which had their best day ever,” while Amazon signed up “more new Prime members on July 16 than any previous day in Amazon history.”
Amazon is loath to provide actual numbers or year-over-year results — and its closest tech rival is similarly opaque, experts say.
“When it comes to iPhone launches, Apple is also a little gray,” said Daniel Ives, head of technology research for GBH Insights. “Once you set a precedent [in providing performance data] you can’t put the genie back in the bottle.”
Amazon reported that its members bought more than 100 million items during the 36-hour shop-a-thon, which ended early Wednesday morning.
But Amazon doesn’t say whether 100 million is a lot or a little, or more than what it sold last year.
“We have not shared the number of items sold on Prime Day 2017,” a spokesperson said in a statement.
Similarly, Amazon claimed that small- and medium-sized businesses selling on Amazon “far exceeded $1 billion in sales” on Prime Day 2018. What about last year? “We have not shared this figure as we do no release sales data to any specific event,” the spokesperson said, adding, “The only time we release any retail numbers is during our quarterly earnings calls.”
The company was generous, however, with disclosing its toy sales data.
It sold more than 5 million toy items this year, or 1.5 million more items than Prime Day a year ago, according to press releases.
Despite scarce data, Wall Street analysts believe that Amazon raked in a lot of dough this year.
GBH estimates that Amazon pulled in $3.6 billion this week, compared with an estimated $2.4 billion a year ago, fueled by Prime membership growth.
It was “jaw dropping” when Amazon said it had more than a 100 million Prime members in April, Ives said.
“The consensus at the time was 80 million to 85 million members,” he added. lfickenscher@nypost.com