Amazon's $4B coronavirus expenses are likely temporary: RBC's Mark Mahaney

Mark Mahaney of RBC Capital Markets and Krish Sankar of Cowen join "Squawk on the Street" to discuss earnings reported by both Apple and Amazon.

Amazon reported its first-quarter earnings after the bell on Thursday, revealing the pandemic’s impact on the business that has been a rare bright spot on the stock market. The stock fell about 5% after hours after missing estimates on earnings while beating revenue expectations.

Here’s what Amazon reported:

Earnings per share (EPS): $5.01
Revenue: $75.45 billion
Amazon Web Services (AWS) revenue: $10.22 billion

Beyond the results, the biggest news in Amazon’s report was that it plans to spend all of its profit from the second quarter -- an estimated $4 billion -- on responding to the coronavirus pandemic. That includes hundreds of millions of dollars it plans to spend on Covid-19 tests for its workers and beefing up its delivery network to get packages to customers on time.

“If you’re a shareowner in Amazon, you may want to take a seat, because we’re not thinking small,” Amazon said in the press release. “Under normal circumstances, in this coming Q2, we’d expect to make some $4 billion or more in operating profit. But these aren’t normal circumstances.”

Wall Street had been anticipating earnings per share of $6.25 on revenue of $73.61 billion, based on Refinitiv consensus estimates. Amazon Web Services revenue was expected to come in at $10.33 billion, based on FactSet estimates. However, it’s difficult to compare reported earnings to analyst estimates for Amazon’s first quarter, as the coronavirus pandemic continues to hit global economies and makes earnings impact difficult to assess.

Amazon CFO Brian Olsavsky told CNBC’s Deirdre Bosa he expects the company will spend $1 billion on Covid-19 testing in the full year 2020. Amazon has designated a team of researchers, engineers, procurement specialists and program managers to work on building incremental testing capacity. Amazon said the team is building a lab and has already begun a pilot test of front-line employees.

“We’re not sure how far we will get in the relevant timeframe, but we think it’s worth trying, and we stand ready to share anything we learn,” Amazon said in the release about its testing plans.

Some of the $4 billion will also fund higher wages for workers, personal protective equipment (PPE), better cleaning protocols at facilities and “less efficient process paths” that will allow for social distancing.

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