Amazon stock surges ahead of its Q1 earnings, Whole Foods restructuring

Yahoo Finance Live discusses Amazon's surging stock ahead of its Q1 earnings report as subsidiary Whole Foods announces job cuts in a new restructuring plan.

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- Another play I wanted to get in today, Amazon. That one is making a run today, up about 3%. It's up ahead of earnings next week. JPMorgan Chase has reiterated it as the best idea of 2023. JPM has a price target of 135. So, it's got more room to run. It's already up more than 20% year-to-date. The gains also come amid news that Whole Foods, it owns, is heading into some restructuring.

According to "The Wall Street Journal," the grocer is streamlining the number of regions it has from nine to a half dozen. Now, streamline means job cuts. And Whole Foods says, it is planning a small number of layoffs, roughly half of a percent of its workforce. Again, as for today, that stock is hot. It's approaching its high for the year. So, it's really making a run.

- The analyst, Tom Forte, who covers Amazon said, he's expecting a disappointing performance overall. He expects more layoffs, but he reiterated, you cannot cut your way to growth there at Amazon. This is not necessarily Meta where you can have the year of efficiencies and your stock price continues to gain, they're going to need something else. And that's going to need to be AWS. That's what they have to show positive growth.

- Yeah, they do, but we know that growth there in that sector has really been slowing now for quite some time. They posted 20% growth in AWS for the fourth quarter. That was below the Street's expectations. And in this economic environment, a lot of businesses are pulling back on their spending. And those cloud divisions are getting hurt. So, if see a disappointing number here from AWS, from Amazon, that could be bad news for the stock.

- Yeah, big gains to end the week, though.