Interessanter Wall Street Journal Artikel: Why eBay, Amazon Shares are up

Why eBay, Amazon Shares are up – sehr interessanter Artikel im Wall Street Journal, hier ein paar Auszüge daraus:

By Mylene Mangalindan

Wall Street is re-evaluating how to measure growth at eBay Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. — and the change is helping to send the stocks of both companies higher. For years, analysts and investors routinely looked to numbers such as total auction listings and new users to gauge whether eBay and Amazon were growth companies. Such figures helped show whether the electronic-commerce companies were adding new customers and building robust enough brand names for themselves, analysts said.

But some on Wall Street now have begun emphasizing other measures such as revenue generated per Internet user, operating margins and overall revenue growth. Many of these metrics are typically used to evaluate retailers such as Starbucks Corp. and Gap Inc. That means some analysts now are comparing eBay and Amazon with brick-and-mortar retailers rather than high-technology concerns.

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But by emphasizing some of the new metrics, prospects for eBay and Seattle-based Amazon look rosier. EBay’s second-quarter revenue rose 30%, its strongest performance since the third quarter of 2006, and its revenue per listing rose 32%, according to some estimates. Meanwhile, Amazon’s free cash flow — which is operating cash flow minus capital expenditures and which acts as a proxy for operating profit — rose 87% in the second quarter from a year earlier.

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All of this helps some analysts and investors justify eBay and Amazon’s expensive valuations. Amazon currently trades at 120 times trailing 12-month earnings and eBay at 38 times its 12-month earnings, both well above Starbucks’s P/E ratio of 33 times its 12-month trailing earnings. Overall, eBay’s stock is up 31% so far this year while Amazon’s has more than doubled.

Ich wünschte mir auch ein P/E Ratio von 120 (!) für eBay…