It was reported in March that Amazon was paying $775 million dollars for Kiva, the robot company. I think it’s going to take a while before they compensate for that.

As to the Q3/Q4 guidance…I still think we could get an announcement soon.

Last year, they announced on September 28th, and shipped on November 15 and November 21.

I think that might have shorted the sales cycle a bit…holiday sales are certainly under way nowadays in October. This year, my guess is that they are going to feel more prepared. I felt like there was a bit of a rush to get the tablet in the market. This time, they have an established product that they are expanding…on both the tablet and RSK (Reflective Screen Kindle) front, unless they introduce a color RSK.

There is also a real possibility of two waves of announcements. They could announce something on Tuesday (frontlit RSKs and lowering the Fire price?) and say that they may have another announcement later in the year…even give a date for a second announcement. That would hype a second announcement when we are more in the season.

Some comments:

They were lucky in a sense as today was also the first time that Facebook reported earnings as a public company — they reported a loss, and the financial and technical press has been all over that with nary a mention (yet) of Amazon’s results .

Somewhere in there a comment was made that the robot company contributed a $96 million dollar loss to the bottom line — I hope that’s a one time event.

Much talk about Q3 guidance and that Amazon will be investing heavily in ramping up for a blowout Q4. Q3 will therefore be as bad or worse than Q2. Reading between the lines of all their Q3 ramp-up talk leads me to think we won’t be getting any product announcements until towards the end of Q3.

18 new fulfillment centers will be built this year of which so far only 6 have opened — so still a big cash flow hit to come there.

Amazon does lose some money on direct sales, I’m sure, but my guess is that it’s largely the investments they are making in robots, streaming video, and such which is really cutting into the margins. That, and the expense of Prime, although that might be made up somewhere else. I think the drop is in overall net income, not specifically profit on sales…