Amazon beats quarterly revenue estimates, cloudbacks delay

On By Littum

By Deborah Mary Sophia, Greg Bensinger

(Reuters) -amazon.com released sales last year, topping Wall Street estimating Thursday as a strong holiday hopping season increased its retail business, but investors drove shares down due to weakness in the cloud computing unit.

Amazon’s shares fell 3.5% in extended trade after the report and deleted approx. $ 90 billion value of stock market value.

The company’s cloud device, Amazon Web Services (AWS), reported an increase of 19% in revenue to $ 28.79 billion that lacked estimates of $ 28.87 billion, according to data prepared by LSEG. Amazon joins smaller sky providers Microsoft and Google in reporting weak sky numbers.

The weakness of the cloud is coming at a time when investors have become more and more impatient with Big Tech’s capital costs of several trillion dollars and are hungry after returns from fierce investments in AI.

Competitors Microsoft and Google Parent Alphabet made up both slow clouds in last year’s fourth quarter and sent shares lower. Companies, along with Meta platforms, said the cost of developing infrastructure for artificial intelligence -software was highly higher expected capital costs for 2025, a total of about $ 230 billion between them.

Still, Amazon’s retail business helped equalize the weakness of the cloud, with the company reporting online sales growth of 7% in the quarter to $ 75.56 billion. It compared to estimates of $ 74.55 billion.

The company reported a $ 187.8 billion revenue in the fourth quarter compared to the average analyst estimate of $ 187.30 billion, according to data prepared by LSEG.

Advertising sales, a closely monitored metric, rose 18% to $ 17.3 billion. It compares with the average estimate of $ 17.4 billion.

Net income was almost doubled to $ 20 billion from $ 10.6 billion the year before. The Seattle retailer reported a $ 1.86 earnings. Share compared to the expectations of $ 1.49 per Stock.

(Reporting Deborah Sophia in Bengaluru and Greg Bensings in San Francisco; Further Reporting of Noel Randewich in Oakland, California; Editing Shounak Dasgupta and Matthew Lewis)