Amazon fails to live up to expectations

Amazon has published rather disappointing quarterly results: although sales climbed slightly higher than expected, net profit fell by a quarter.

Services are becoming increasingly important

In the third quarter, Amazon achieved a total turnover of 69.98 billion dollars (63 billion euros), up 24 % compared to the same period last year. Sales of goods still represent almost 57 % of the turnover, with the remainder derived from all kinds of services such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), which provides cloud services and grew by 35 % in the past quarter.

Operating profit fell from 3.7 billion dollars to 3.2 billion dollars (2.9 billion euros) as a result of rising costs: logistics costs linked to the faster shipment of parcels (Amazon Prime) in particular rose spectacularly. In addition, personnel costs related to AWS increased by almost a third.

Net profit fell by 26 % from 2.9 billion dollars to 2.1 billion dollars (1.9 billion euros). According to De Tijd, analysts had expected a profit of about 2.3 billion dollars (2.1 billion euros). Investors did not take this setback very well, and shares immediately took quite a knock.