Amazon 2Q results on tap next week

If Amazon makes good on its guidance for the second quarter, sales during the period ended June 30 rose somewhere between 15% and 26% to range from $18.1 billion to $19.8 billion.

Amazon is schedule to report second quarter results after the market closes on July 24 and host a conference call at 5 p.m. EST. As has been the case with other quarterly periods, the issue is never how much additional volume the company generated, that tends to be a given, but how much it invested in the business and what sort of new innovations were brought to market. Amazon always has plenty to talk about with an active product and content pipeline and increasingly robust capabilities in its web services unit. The bigger question is how much the company invested into the business with profits more of an afterthought to investors. For example, in the first quarter, sales increased 23% to $19.7 billion, while net income grew nearly 32% but totaled only $108 million.