Amazon profits fall and its share price follows

Internet giant Amazon announced strong sales growth but that didn’t translate into profit after it invested heavily in one-day shipping.

The consequent significant year-on-year rise in operating expenses, combined with shrinking margin at AWS, where most of Amazon’s profit comes from, resulted in quarterly operating income declining for the first time in a while. While investors had been warned about the increased overheads, they were apparently even greater than expected, because Amazon’s share price declined 6% on the news.

“We are ramping up to make our 25th holiday season the best ever for Prime customers — with millions of products available for free one-day delivery,” said Jeff Bezos, Amazon founder and CEO. “Customers love the transition of Prime from two days to one day — they’ve already ordered billions of items with free one-day delivery this year.

“It’s a big investment, and it’s the right long-term decision for customers. And although it’s counterintuitive, the fastest delivery speeds generate the least carbon emissions because these products ship from fulfillment centers very close to the customer — it simply becomes impractical to use air or long ground routes. Huge thanks to all the teams helping deliver for customers this holiday.”

As you can see from the table below, Amazon’s total overheads were 14 billion bucks higher in the most recent quarter than they were a year ago. North America is still where most of its sales are and thus where most of the overheads come from too. Profits disproportionality come from its AWS cloud services division, but even there margins are significantly reduced year-on-year.

Amazon has spent its entire history sacrificing profit on the altar of investment, and that seems to have paid off. So it’s hard to read too much into the share price fall other than a realisation among investors that Amazon is serious about this one-day delivery stuff. That will probably pay off in the long term too, and we expect Bezos isn’t very bothered about the short term reaction to his grand plan.