Friday July 30th 2021
Despite a solid profit increase
Amazon disappoints investors
Amazon increases sales and profits significantly in the second quarter as well – but not significantly enough in the eyes of investors. Because analysts had predicted more, they let the stock drop by four percent after the hours.
The Amazon founder and long-time company boss Jeff Bezos sends his successor Andy Jassy into troubled waters. Sales of the world’s largest online retailer fell short of expectations in the past quarter. In addition, a slowdown is expected in the current quarter, said the group, which had so far been successful in the corona pandemic, on Thursday after the US stock market closed.
With vaccination campaigns advancing around the world, more and more stores would be reopening and as people were spending more time outside their four walls, they would also shop less online. The announcement was very badly received on the stock exchange: Amazon shares initially fell by seven percent after the hours of trading.
Microsoft and Google are growing faster
Jassy took over the helm of the Seattle company on July 5th, replacing Bezos after 27 years at the helm. Jassy previously headed the extremely successful cloud division AWS, which also scored in the past quarter with a 37 percent increase in sales to $ 14.8 billion. However, competitors Microsoft and Google recently saw greater growth. The net profit climbed from April to June by 48 percent to 7.8 billion dollars. It’s the second highest quarterly result ever. Sales also increased by a hefty 27 percent to around $ 113 billion. Analysts had expected an average of two billion dollars more.
The US group, which started selling books, is now present in many areas: Amazon operates the Whole Food supermarket chain, is building a health system and is now also calling the James Bond film studio MGM its own. Amazon now has more than 200 million Prime subscribers who can order more cheaply and, for example, watch videos. Similar to Google and Facebook, Amazon has set itself the goal of vaccinating all employees – but does not want to make this mandatory.
.