Share price drops for both Amazon and Google after quarterlies

Despite reporting quarterly numbers most companies would kill for Amazon and Alphabet share prices dropped by 8.6% and 5% respectively due to investor disappointment.

More than anything else it shows the high demands of investors but also the confidence which is being placed in the internet giants. With Amazon reporting a revenue increase of 29% to $56.6 billion for the quarter, while Google parent company Alphabet reported $33.7 billion, up 21%, the expectations are certainly high.

Starting with Amazon, the revenue increase of 29% paled in comparison to the more than 10X lift in net income to $2.9 billion. While this would be a regular cash bonanza for most companies around the world, sales guidance between $66.5 billion and $72.5 billion for final quarter were lower than what the market wanted to hear. The more coy guidance for Amazon’s busiest quarter resulted in the 8.6% drop, after confidence during the day sent stock up 7%.

In Google’s HQ the story was slightly different. Revenues of $33.7 billion, up 21%, and net income of $9.1 billion, compared to $6.7 billion in 2017. Shares were down 5%, following a 4.4% rise across the day, after sales figures did not hit the expected heights. The last three months have been a tough period for investors to swallow with various scandals dropping share price by 8.8% over the last three months.

Of course, it wasn’t all bad news. The cloud unit for both businesses is continuing to rack up revenues with AWS up 45% to $6.7 billion across the quarter and Google’s other revenues segment, which features cloud up 29% to $4.6 billion. Encouragingly for both, Gartner estimates the worldwide public cloud services market is projected to grow 17% percent in 2019 to total $206.2 billion, up from $175.8 billion in 2018. IaaS is set to get the largest boost, forecast to grow 27.6% in 2019 to reach $39.5 billion. With so many businesses around the world citing a cloud-first approach, it’s amazing to think only 10% of workloads have been moved into the cloud.

The relatively new venture into the world of smart speakers and virtual assistants is proving to be a continued success story as well. For Amazon, the number of Alexa-compatible smart home devices has quintupled to more than 20,000 devices from 3,500, while the team have also started to launch new products such as a smart home security solution (Alexa Guard), and Alexa is expanding what it can give updates on as well, such sports with predictions, live streams, cooking instructions and maths homework. For Google. the Assistant has expanded to 20 languages and 76 countries, while the devices with screens will help YouTube business, which is attempting to blend in more direct response adverts as well as branding to its proposition.

There will of course be short-term wins for the pair in this space, but this is a long-term bet. Once the idea has been adopted by the mass market, the opportunities to make money through third-party relationships will be quite remarkable. Search revenues can be moved into the voice domain (effectively anywhere) and look how profitable search has been for Google. This is only one way to make money, but both Amazon and Google are putting themselves in a remarkably strong position for the future.

Both businesses might have suffered in the last 24 hours but they are still in incredibly dominant positions. The cloud units still have incredible growth potential, while the smart speaker ecosystem is starting to become a reality. For Google, the is delivering amazing profitability but sales growth does seem to be slowing slightly. Amazon is delivering on the North American market but the business is not as effective on the international scene, posting a loss of $385 million.

There are issues, but these are nothing compared to the billions being raked in and the growth potential in new, lucrative markets.