Amazon’s (NASDAQ: AMZN) earnings for the third quarter, while still quite massive in overall terms, didn’t quite meet the expected earnings targets that were set for the company. They had been making great headway over the past few years, but this quarter they missed it by a mile. And as a result, Jeff Bezos is worth $3.2 billion less mere hours after they released the earnings results.
Bezos missed the mark, but still investing and diversifying like mad
Amazon’s income for the third quarter was above the red, but was 52 cents per share. Analysts, based on the performance of the last year or so, predicted that it should be around 78 cents per share. They still ended up with a 29% increase in overall sales, though they didn’t quite make the amount of money off of those sales that was predicted. Just after they released their earnings, stock dropped 6% and continued to drop another 5% after that, finally closing at $782.10 last night. Meaning Bezos himself is losing quite a bit of money himself.
It’s a huge miss on the part of Amazon, not making analyst expectations for the first time in a very long time. In fact, in any other company it could have ended up as a precedent for other negative decisions, such as mass layoffs, but it seems that Jeff Bezos is keeping the confidence high as they’re still gaining, though slower than expected. He’s still investing in new business, having recently created a Twitch-intertwined Prime option and expanding upon their Alexa voice recognition and devices that support it. They’re also making headway with some critically acclaimed Amazon Studio productions for Prime members. Further invesments are going towards improving AWS, expanding AmazonFresh and even moving, if slowly, into the fashion world.
Missing the mark isn’t the end of the world for Amazon, nor the bank account of Jeff Bezos, but it’s perhaps time to look at the company as a slower growing behemoth. For now. Things are definitely changing, but so too is Amazon.