Overstock.com (OSTK) on strategy (quotes from the conf call)

Overstock's conference call is one of the most lively of earnings season. These quotes just don't do it justice. But here they are anyway. CEO Patrick Byrne talks about price competition with Amazon, Overstock's expected 2005 growth, customer growth rate, gross margins and auctions:

On competition with Amazon:

...99% of our books are priced below Amazon. We check that constantly.

On Overstock's move into travel, auctions and jewelry:

We are turning into Earth's Biggest Discounter. Which, incidentally, we have trademarked.

On auctions:

We launched an auction tab that competes directly with eBay. Did it for a couple of million dollars. And you may not think we have a snowball's chance of doing it, but I think we have already become -- if there is anyone who is going to compete with eBay, it is -- maybe it is going to be us.

On customer growth:

...had over 1 million new customers in the quarter.

On revenue growth in 2005:

Count on us to grow 60 percent.

...we structure ourselves to grow 100 percent. All of our logistics planning is really, actually, to even grow to about the billion 1, billion 2 range this year.

On gross margins:

Then the gross margin. Yes we've gone from 9 to 15 percent.

…[an analyst wrote that] our 15 percent is pretty much the same as Amazon's 23, 24 percent because they do this thing where they move 9 points of cost of goods into SG&A which they disclose... On an apples to apples basis, basically there really isn't any difference anymore.

(Quotes from the CCBN StreetEvents transcript.)