Amazon Shares Fall After Reporting Sales Of $13.81B For Q3, Loss Of 60 Cents Per Share

Amazon.com just released its third-quarter earnings report. Analysts had been predicted growth in sales along with a net loss, and that’s what happened — but the numbers still fell a bit short. Net sales grew to $13.81 billion, up 27 percent from the same period last year. The company saw a net loss $274 million, or 60 cents per diluted share, compared to operating income of $63 million last year.

Analysts had predicted revenue of $13.9 billion and a loss of 8 cents per share. Amazon’s net income has been falling for the past couple of quarters, as you can see in the chart below.

Breaking sales down geographically, Amazon says North American sales were $7.88 billion, up 33 percent year-over-year, and international sales were $5.92 billion, up 20 percent. Media sales grew 11 percent to $4.6 billion, while sales of electronics and other general merchandise grew 36 percent, to $8.56 billion.

As usual, Amazon isn’t including sales numbers for specific devices. Instead, there’s lots of crowing about the specs of the various new Kindle devices, and this statement from CEO Jeff Bezos does reveal how the products stack up against each other:

Our approach is to work hard to charge less. Sell devices near breakeven and you can pack a lot of sophisticated hardware into a very low price point. And our approach is working – the $199 Kindle Fire HD is the #1 bestselling product across Amazon worldwide. Incredibly, this is true even as measured by unit sales. The next two bestselling products worldwide are our Kindle Paperwhite and our $69 Kindle. We’re selling more of each of these devices than the #4 bestselling product, book three of the Fifty Shades of Grey series. And we haven’t even started shipping our best tablet – the $299 Kindle Fire HD 8.9” ships November 20.

The company is providing fourth-quarter guidance that sales will grow between 16 percent and 31 percent, to somewhere between $20.25 billion and $22.75 billion, with operating income/loss anywhere between a $490 million loss and $310 million income.

As of 4:38pm Eastern, Amazon shares are down 0.43 percent, to $221.97, in after-hours trading.

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