Amazon Records Best Ever Profit During Q4, Still Fails To Impress Wall Street
Investors weren't as pumped as Amazon about its fourth quarter performance in which the online commerce giant collected $35.7 billion. That's a healthy jump of 22 percent form the $29.3 billion it registered in the same quarter a year prior and, once all the bills were paid, it left Amazon with a record Q4 profit of $482 million, or $1.00 per diluted share, more than double the $214 million it logged a year prior.
Ah, but investors are a prickly bunch, always ready to poke holes in financial reports and overreact to the slightest suggestion that something might be amiss. It happens quite frequently to Apple, and it's happening now to Amazon, as its shares spiraled downwards more than 13 percent in after hours trading. Things have improved slightly after the opening bell, but at the time of this writing, shares of Amazon are still down around 9 percent, having dropped $56.86 per share.
Reports from around the web suggest that Amazon failed to meet analysts' expectations, both in revenue and in the number of new Prime members added to the fold. Be that as it may, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos maintained a positive beat and exuded enthusiast about Amazon's future opportunities.
"Twenty years ago, I was driving the packages to the post office myself and hoping we might one day afford a forklift. This year, we pass $100 billion in annual sales and serve 300 million customers," said Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com. "And still, measured by the dynamism we see everywhere in the marketplace and by the ever-expanding opportunities we see to invent on behalf of customers, it feels every bit like Day 1."
Getting back to Amazon's Prime membership, the company said it added 51 percent more paid accounts overall, and 47 percent in the U.S. This led to a nearly doubling of the streaming customers for its Prime Video service compared to the same quarter a year prior.
Ah, but investors are a prickly bunch, always ready to poke holes in financial reports and overreact to the slightest suggestion that something might be amiss. It happens quite frequently to Apple, and it's happening now to Amazon, as its shares spiraled downwards more than 13 percent in after hours trading. Things have improved slightly after the opening bell, but at the time of this writing, shares of Amazon are still down around 9 percent, having dropped $56.86 per share.
Reports from around the web suggest that Amazon failed to meet analysts' expectations, both in revenue and in the number of new Prime members added to the fold. Be that as it may, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos maintained a positive beat and exuded enthusiast about Amazon's future opportunities.
"Twenty years ago, I was driving the packages to the post office myself and hoping we might one day afford a forklift. This year, we pass $100 billion in annual sales and serve 300 million customers," said Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com. "And still, measured by the dynamism we see everywhere in the marketplace and by the ever-expanding opportunities we see to invent on behalf of customers, it feels every bit like Day 1."
Getting back to Amazon's Prime membership, the company said it added 51 percent more paid accounts overall, and 47 percent in the U.S. This led to a nearly doubling of the streaming customers for its Prime Video service compared to the same quarter a year prior.
