Amazon gives Wall Street mixed financial picture in earnings report

Amazon offered a mixed picture of its financial health on Thursday in its quarterly earnings report. The e-commerce company gave a cautious sales forecast for the current fourth quarter, which encompasses the critical holiday shopping period, after delivering fiscal third-quarter results that came in below Wall Street analysts’ expectations.

The Seattle-based company posted strong growth, however, in its prominent cloud computing unit. Sales in its cloud computing unit, called AWS, rose 39.3% during the latest quarter ended 30 September, higher than the 37% clip in the previous quarter. It marked the fastest growth rate in nearly five years, the company said.

Still, shares were down more than 6% in after-market trading when the results were released as investors focused on the core business. The tech company said earlier this month that it would hire 300,000 US seasonal workers for the shopping period, up from 250,000 last year. Investors also have been closely watching Amazon’s quarterly earnings to see if the company’s big spending on artificial intelligence is starting to pay off.

Andy Jassy, the company’s CEO and president, disclosed to investors in July that Amazon now expects capital spending, mostly on artificial intelligence, to total $220bn for this fiscal year. That number includes outlays on robots, semiconductors and satellites. That’s up from the $200bn investment plan that was announced in February and well above the $128bn in capital spending for all of last year.

Jassy had cited the higher cost of memory chips as the main reason for the increase. Jassy told investors this past summer that even at the $220bn level, Amazon will not have enough capacity to meet all of its customers’ demands this year. The latest earnings report from Alphabet late Wednesday raised alarm bells when it reported weaker growth for the summer than analysts expected.

The company behind Google and YouTube also said it burned through more cash during the latest quarter, according to a measure called free cashflow, after its purchases of property and equipment topped $51bn. Its stock plummeted on Thursday, erasing half a trillion dollars in from the company’s total value.

Such worries are weighing on the entire AI industry following a big push to build datacenters and fill them with AI chips. Amazon reported net income of $20.69bn, or $1.89 per share, in the three-month period. That compares with $21.19bn, or $1.95 per share, in the year-ago period. skip past newsletter promotion after newsletter promotion Sales rose to $201.94bn, compared with the same year-ago period’s $180.17bn.

Analysts were expecting $1.97 per share on sales of $202.2bn, according to FactSet. For the fourth quarter, Amazon said it expected net sales to be between $240bn and $247bn, which translates to a 12% to 16% increase compared with the year-ago period. Analysts were expecting $244.16bn.