Amazon shares start slipping on weak Q4 earnings report
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The 2013 holiday season didn't pan out to be very fruitful as hoped for many retailers, and it was questionable how Amazon fared going into Thursday's fourth quarter earnings report.
The online retail giant reported a net income of $239 million, or 52 cents per share (statement).
Non-GAAP earnings were 51 cents per share on a revenue of $25.59 billion.
That's a 20 percent increase from the same quarter last year, but Wall Street was expecting Amazon to report non-GAAP fourth quarter earnings of 67 cents a share on revenue of $26.05 billion.
As a result, Amazon shares started to slip in after-hours trading.
Sales were also up for 2013 overall. The Seattle-headquartered corporation churned an annual revenue of $74.45 billion, up 22 percent from 2012.
Pushing those figures to the side in favor of buzzed-about products launched over the last three months, CEO Jeff Bezos reflected on the quarter in prepared remarks:
It’s a good time to be an Amazon customer. You can now read your Kindle gate-to-gate, get instant on-device tech support via our revolutionary Mayday button, and have packages delivered to your door even on Sundays. In just the last weeks, Forrester, YouGov, and ForeSee have all ranked Amazon #1 – and we believe we’re just scratching the surface of what world-class customer service can be.
For the current quarter, Wall Street wants Amazon to return with earnings of 54 cents per share on a revenue of $19.67 billion.
Amazon offered a revenue guidance range of $18.2 billion and $19.9 billion.
Here's a closer look at how Amazon wrapped up the year, by the numbers:
- Along with hosting AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas in November, Amazon Web Services added more than 100 new services and features during the quarter. Some of the big intros included WorkSpaces, AppStream, Kinesis, and three new Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances.
- The AWS Marketplace now hosts over 1,100 third-party software products.
- AWS is deploying a region in China, marking the fourth AWS region in Asia/Pacific and 10th worldwide.
- Average response time for Mayday customer service function on Kindle Fire HDX was nine seconds, versus the goal of 15 seconds, on Christmas Day alone.
- Kindle Owners' Lending Library grew from 250,000 books to more than 475,000 books over the year.
- Prime Instant Video selection increased from 33,000 to more than 40,000 movies and TV episodes in 2013.