Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) recently reported its second-quarter results that failed to impress the market. The company reported a slowdown within its e-tail segment and attributed the same to tough comparisons from the previous year when Covid had spiked eCommerce sales. As businesses and economies slowly re-open Amazon’s eCommerce segment will face a crunch, but it is looking to address the situation by expanding services such as same-day shipping and by focusing on other segments such as media streaming.

Amazon’s Financials

Amazon’s second-quarter revenues grew 27% to $113.08 billion, below the market’s forecast of $115.2 billion. Net income of $15.12 per share was significantly higher than the Street’s forecast of $12.30 per share.

By segment, net product sales grew 15.5% from $50.24 billion last year to $58.004 billion and net service sales increased 42.4% from $38.7 billion to $55.1 billion.

North American sales grew 21.9% to $67.6 billion, while international sales grew 35.5% to $30.7 billion.

Amazon expects its current quarter revenues at $106-$112 billion, compared with the market’s estimate of $119.2 billion.

Amazon’s Streaming Focus

During the quarter, Amazon announced its acquisition of Beverly Hills-based MGM Studios. Founded in 1924 by Louis B. Mayer and Marcus Loew, MGM is known as the powerhouse that produces and distributes film and television content on several platforms. For $8.45 billion, Amazon announced the acquisition of MGM’s entire catalog of films, that will now be available to its streaming customers. This is Amazon’s second-largest acquisition after it had acquired Whole Foods for an estimated $13.6 billion in 2017.

MGM’s content line-up includes titles like James Bond and Rocky franchises along with TV series such as The Handmaid’s Tale and Fargo. The online streaming competition has become fierce since the arrival of Disney+ and Apple TV. Consolidation is rife in the market as Discovery also announced plans to merge with WarnerMedia earlier this summer. Analysts estimate that other smaller streaming players like Viacom, Fox, and LionsGate will soon be acquired as well as companies look to expand their content library and subscriber base. Besides access to MGM’s content, Amazon is looking to leverage MGM’s vast IP library to continue to build and add content for Prime streaming.

Amazon had released Amazon Studios over ten years ago, but it has not had much success when compared with the likes of Netflix that continue to produce award-winning series. Amazon plans to change that by injecting both funding and leadership within the segment. It recently announced the creation of a new global media and entertainment division to help drive that objective. Recently, Amazon announced that it had allocated $465 million for the production of the Lord of the Rings TV series – the largest ever budget for a streaming show.

Besides content, Amazon continues to expand efforts on its other segments as well. It recently announced a partnership with Salesforce that will integrate AWS and Salesforce products to allow developers to build and launch custom applications that use the power of both platforms by connecting Salesforce’s data and workflows into the solutions being run on AWS. The partnership will facilitate the integration of AWS data for Salesforce developers into their Salesforce applications. Customers will be able to purchase out-of-the-box solutions from Salesforce and use the AWS services on a pay-as-you-go basis.

Within its fulfillment services, Amazon is now allowing sellers to use its logistics and shipping services to sell items on other marketplaces such as eBay and Etsy. Earlier last week, it also announced that it was expanding its Prime same-day shipping offering to six new cities – Baltimore, Chicago, Detroit, Tampa, Charlotte, and Houston. With this expansion, Amazon’s same-day reach has grown to cover nearly 18% of the US population compared with 9% serviced earlier.

Its stock is trading at $3,341.87 with a market capitalization of $1.69 trillion. It had touched a 52-week high of $3,773.08 in July and a 52-week low of $2,871.00 in September last year.