Amazon Reports Best Quarterly Profit Ever
January 28 2016 - 5:00PM
Dow Jones News
Amazon.com Inc. reported the largest quarterly profit in its
19-year history as a public company, as more consumers eschew
brick-and-mortar retail for the convenience of ordering goods and
services from their couch.
However, shares of Amazon, which have more than doubled over the
past year, fell 13% to $555 in after-hours trading as the company's
results were below analyst expectations.
The Seattle online retailer posted a 22% gain in sales and more
than doubled its net income. The period marked a big shift from
just over a year ago when Amazon turned in its biggest quarterly
loss in 14 years.
While physical retail stagnates, Amazon has captured more
customers by aggressively building out new warehouses near urban
centers to speed deliveries and by bulking up its Prime unlimited
shipping membership with streaming video and other benefits. And it
has built up a huge lead on rivals in offering cloud computing
services through its lucrative Amazon Web Services unit.
Amazon recorded $35.75 billion in sales in last year's final
three months, up from $29.3 billion in the year-earlier period. Its
$482 million in profit, or $1 a share, compares with $214 million,
or 51 cents a share, a year earlier and surpasses the $416 million
it posted in the fourth quarter of 2010.
Analysts, however, were expecting $36 billion in sales and net
income of $754 million, or $1.56 a share.
For the current first quarter, Amazon sees sales between $26.5
billion and $29.0 billion, straddling the average analyst estimate
of $27.65 billion among analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters.
By contrast, eBay Inc. on Wednesday said it failed to improve
sales during the holiday season and issued a weak outlook for the
coming quarter.
Amazon's AWS division, which rents computing power to other
companies from thousands of servers, saw sales jump 69% to $2.4
billion and operating profits rise to $687 million from $240
million, reinforcing its place as Amazon's fast-rising growth
engine. Still, results fell below expectations. Analysts were
forecasting revenue gains of at least 70%; Raymond James, for
instance, projected a 73% rise.
Amazon has in recent months announced new AWS data centers in
Ohio, China, the U.K., South Korea and India, highlighting the
global ambition of the division and its widening lead on rivals
Microsoft Corp. and Alphabet Inc.
Amazon is still spending heavily on its business. The company's
operating costs rose 20.5% to $34.6 billion from $28.7 billion a
year earlier.
Write to Greg Bensinger at greg.bensinger@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
January 28, 2016 16:45 ET (21:45 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2016 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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