(News Bulletin 247) – With a decline of more than 3%, Amazon suffered one of the largest declines in the S&P 500 index on Friday, its good quarterly results being overshadowed by fears of a slowdown in the growth of AWS, its flagship division.
The e-commerce group announced last night that Amazon Web Services, its dematerialized computing division (‘cloud’), had seen its operating profit fall to 5.1 billion dollars in the first quarter, against 6.5 billion one year earlier.
The division’s sales growth has also slowed significantly, with sales up 16% in the first three months of 2023, compared to +20% in the fourth quarter and +27% in the third quarter of 2022.
Faced with these figures, investors are wondering about Amazon’s ability to keep up with the risk of a recession in the United States, which could result in a contraction in technology spending by companies.
During the conference call following the release of the results, the management team itself acknowledged that AWS growth had decelerated by another five basis points in April, which corresponds to a pace of 11% growth.
On this point, the Seattle group suffers from the comparison with its main competitors in the ‘cloud’, namely Microsoft and Google, whose performance pleasantly surprised investors this week.
Elsewhere, Amazon’s first-quarter results turned out to be much better than expected: revenue rose 9% to $127.4 billion, versus a consensus of $123.5 billion.
As for net profit, it stood at 3.2 billion, or 31 cents per share, where the consensus was expecting only 14 cents.
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