Citi previews Amazon's re:Invent conference

With attendance at the week-long event predicted to be in excess of 30,000 people, analysts at Citi opted to preview some of the potential effects of the much-hyped event on Monday morning.

Citi noted that although much like Apple events many of the major announcements that would be made at re:Invent were already known, Jeff Bezos and company had a tendency to drop surprise announcements every year that held the potential to greatly affect the market.

AWS chief executive Andy Jassy and Werner Vogels, the group's chief technical officer, would make their keynote speeches on Wednesday and Thursday, where major announcements had historically been more product rather than price related, and had been rumoured to focus on Internet-of-Things (IoT) services, healthcare, artificial intelligence, database solutions and security.

For simplicity, Citi tracked pricing changes for what it viewed as the most common offerings from AWS such as EC2, Amazon's rentable virtual computers, and said that it expected their price to be cut by between 5-10% in the near term.

The broker also noted that Amazon had already lowered the price on its baseline storage product S3 much less frequently than those for EC2, yet while prices had already seen a considerable 23% drop in November 2016, it believed "a 10% reduction could be announced near term" was possible.

Citi did not make any changes to Amazon's rating or target price, which it kept at 'buy' and $1,250.00 per share, respectively.

As of 1430 GMT, shares had gained 1.15% in pre-market trading to $1,186.00 each.