preview

Analysis Of Amazon 's Income Statement And Balance Sheet

Decent Essays
The next segment of this look at the financial condition of Amazon.com involves a horizontal and vertical analysis of Amazon’s income statement and balance sheet. Since both of these statements involve many segments, we will address key and noteworthy figures to gain a broad understanding of Amazon’s progress in the last three years.
Horizontal Analysis Simply put, the horizontal analysis compares specific line items on a financial statement to a base year and computes a percentage change for the year in question. Our horizontal analysis here uses 2013 as the base year and looks at subsequent change relative to that. On the income statement, we should be cheered Amazon’s strong 43.72% growth in net sales between 2013 and 2015, which
…show more content…
Again, we start with the income statement, where total sales is the denominator in the vertical analysis computation. The first thing you will see is that while Amazon credits three quarters of their total sales to product sales, the service sales category rose nearly eight percent as a portion of total sales over the last three years. To the credit of Amazon, they succeeded in reducing the portion of sales eaten into by expenses from 99% to just under 98%, with the cost of sales decreasing at the greatest rate (among operating expenses). Turning our attention to the balance sheet, total assets (necessarily equal to total liability plus stockholders equity) acts as our denominator for the analysis. We note that current assets make up just over half of the majority of total assets while plant property and equipment still stands out as a momentous portion of Amazon’s worth. Concurrently, while the company’s short-term liabilities have shrunk as a percentage of total assets, their long-term liabilities shot up from 7.95% to 12.58% of total assets. Given an increased reliance on long-term debt, corporate accountants must pay close attention to when the debt will mature to ensure that Amazon can anticipate that expense and address it appropriately. Thanks to vertical analysis, this
Get Access