Wall street was shocked Thursday after the close as Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) missed earnings in what was supposed to be a lay up. After the close the tech giant reported a miss on revenue which was expected to be $44.7 billion. Amazon reported $43.7 billion which was still up 22% year over year but was $1 billion short of expectations. Amazon reported sales that were up 24% year over year, and had earnings per shares that were above expectations, at $1.54 versus the consensus of $1.35.
The stock price shot lower in after hours trading by 4.29%, holding just above the $800 per share mark. The move, for the moment will have erased over a months worth of gains all in one shot, yet still maintaining a gain on the year of over 6.5%.
In other news, Amazon announced that it would be expecting its first quarter revenue to also be below expectations. The company said it expects revenue in the range of $33.25 billion to $35.75 billion which would be below the $35.95 expectation.
One other focus in the report was on the Amazon Web Services, or AWS which had revenue of $3.53 billion, up 47% from this time last year. For the entire year AWS showed revenue of $12.2 billion which was up a nice 55%. This eased concerns that Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) or Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) were starting to eat into Amazons market shares in the cloud space.
Finally, Amazon announced the launch of Amazon GO in Seattle, which is a new store that has no checkout counters. Simply leaving the store when your done would automatically charge your amazon account.
There are always many good things in the works for Amazon, but as for the fourth quarter it seems they have disappointed...For now.