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The Headlines look great. Sales of $200B up 20% YoY, an acceleration of growth to levels not seen in the last couple of years. Mostly driven by AWS sales of $42B which was up 37% YoY. However, from what I could see, that´s the last good thing I could thing there is to this report.
First, excluding the large impact from investments in Anthropic, net income per share
of $1,68 missed guidance of $1,82 and was flat YoY. Same for operating cashflow. The reported 33% increase can be attributed to a deferral in income taxes, which if not postponed, had brought the operating cashflow to about $27,7B which would be a decrease of about 15% YoY. Even including +$1B in YoY negative working capital impact, it would still be a low teens percentage decrease. And that´s with adding on
depreciation which increased about $5B compared to last year, however since most
of that was likely debt financed, it still must be repaid at some point, so the decrease in operating cashflow is likely even more severe.
Now in the investing segment of the cashflow statement is where the real magic lies. Amazons purchasing of non-marketable securities or rather investments in non-publicly traded companies was $24,4B in Q2 alone and for the six months ended June 30 it reached $39,8B. So, they basically poured almost their entire tax-adjusted operating cashflow into non-publicly traded companies, with most of that being
Anthropic. That number was only $4,8B for the entirety of 2025. Now you can make of that what you want, however if that doesn´t scream circular financing I don´t know what to tell you. I mean just compare the $24,4B and $39,8B numbers to their reported $25B AWS-AI annual “revenue run rate”, which is also so easy to
manipulate. Run rate just means any month of the year times twelve, so much for transparency, I guess. We also don´t get to see the operating margins within the AI- segment or the chip-business for that matter.
Looking at the balance sheet, you can see for yourself why their last bond offering was only 1,4x oversubscribed compared to the usual investment-grade offerings at around 4x. Their long-term debt is up 96% from two quarters ago to $129B, lease liabilities are $94B and other long-term liabilities are up 120% from Q4’2025 to about $80B, for a company with negative $7,6B in TTM free-cashflow, with plans to spend
and raise even more. Wouldn´t be surprised if they had to start raising equity in the coming months after their last disappointing debt offerings. This also doesn´t include future obligations in relation to the SPVs that Amazon has launched to finance datacenters with debt from private credit. Since the ownership structure is usually 80/20 in favor of the private credit facilitator (Blackrock, Blackstone, Apollo etc.), hyperscalers like Amazon don´t have to put the debt on their balance sheet. And the
lease obligations for the datacenters only show up once the project is finished, meaning those don´t yet show up either.
Just wanted to shed some light on the other side since I´ve only seen positive reviews of Amazons report. What´s your take on the company and the earnings?