Another quarter, another Amazon financial report that comes in well below analyst estimates.
Investors’ Love Affair With Amazon May Be Over as Q3 Results Fall Short
Ruh roh.
Jason Del Rey has been a business journalist for 15 years and has covered Amazon, Walmart, and the e-commerce industry for the last decade. He was a senior correspondent at Vox.
Amazon just announced it recorded a net loss of 95 cents a share in the third quarter on $20.58 billion revenue, while analysts were expecting a loss per share of 74 cents on $20.84 billion.
The results sent Amazon’s stock down more than 10 percent in after-hours trading. It was already down 23 percent on the year as some investors have grown tired of the company’s continued “invest now, show profits later” approach.
Amazon’s forecast for the all-important current holiday quarter also disappointed. The company said it expects fourth-quarter revenue of between $27.3 billion and $30.3 billion, which would mark year-over-year growth of between seven percent and 18 percent. Analysts were expecting the high end of that range to clock in around $31 billion.
I’ll be updating this post with information from the company’s calls with reporters and analysts.
Update 4:48 pm ET: On a call with reporters, I asked Amazon CFO Tom Szutak if the company was surprised by what appears to be very weak demand for Amazon’s first smartphone, the Fire. Szutak called the phone “a good device in a very competitive market” which is a far cry from CEO Jeff Bezos’s comments in June when he told Re/code, “Our job is to build the greatest device we know how to build.”
Szutak also said there are “a wide range of outcomes” when launching new devices, which is about as close as an Amazon exec will get to publicly saying the Fire phone has been a disappointment.
On a separate conference call with analysts, Amazon said it is taking a $170 million writedown “primarily related to Fire phone inventory valuation and supplier commitment costs.”
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
See More:
