Amazon Could Contribute More Than Half Of Retail Sector's Earnings Growth This Holiday Season

The holiday shopping season kicked off with Black Friday, which raked in record online sales of $6.22 billion, up 23.6 percent year-over-year, according to Adobe Analytics data. 

This should bode well for Amazon.com, Inc. AMZN, which has bulldozed its way to e-commerce dominance and arguably edged some brick-and-mortar retailers out of business.

Leading The Retail Pack

The company's influence on the retail sector was further confirmed by data released by FactSet. In its weekly earnings insight, the firm said Amazon would be responsible for more than 50 percent of the year-over-year earnings growth among S&P 500 retailers in the holiday quarter.

The retail and food and staples industry groups are expected to report earnings growth of 15 percent in Q4. The internet and direct marketing retail sub-industry — one of13 retail sub-industries — will lead the way, with an estimated 69.4-percent growth, according to FactSet. 

Source: FactSet

Amazon is expected to report the highest earnings growth within the internet and direct marketing retail sub-industry.

As a corollary of the stellar growth, Amazon would be the single biggest contributor to the earnings growth of retailing and foods and staples retail companies if the projection proves true. 

If Amazon's earnings were excluded, the earnings growth of these companies would fall from 15 percent to 6.8 percent, according to FactSet. 

The consensus estimates for the December quarter call for roughly 160-percent year-over-year earnings growth for Amazon to $5.55 per share, and more muted 18.8-percent sales growth to $71.81 billion, according to the Yahoo database.

After hitting a $1-trillion market cap earlier this year, Amazon's shares have pulled back along with the broader market since October. The stock is still up 28.4 percent year-to-date.

Amazon shares were trading more than 4 percent higher at $1,563.19 at the time of publication Monday. The SPDR S&P Retail XRT was up 1.45 percent to $45.53. 

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