Amazon's sales projections for the important holiday quarter disappointed Wall Street on Thursday and third-quarter results missed forecasts, dropping the online retailer's shares 9 percent lower.
After a busy first half of 2014 saw the company spend on developing everything from mobile phones and Hollywood-style production to grocery deliveries, investors were ready to see it curtail its ambitions and start providing maintainable profits.
Instead it posted a much larger loss than expected and Amazon projected 7 to 18 percent revenue growth over the busiest shopping period of the year, according to Reuters. This is a big difference from the 20 percent-plus pace that had investors convinced to overlook its lack of profit in the past.
"That kind of takes the topline growth story off the table. And now they've got to deliver on profit margins," said Rob Plaza, senior analyst at Key Private Bank.
"Because of all that money they need to spend to drive growth, it becomes an expensive proposition," he added.
Thursday's after-hours share losses wipe more than $15 billion off of Amazon's market value.
Amazon's stock had already been down 13 percent since its last quarterly results announcement, which took place back in July, when the company also missed targets.
Some analysts are worried that the U.S. holiday shopping season, considered to be the biggest quarter for most retailers, might now turn out weaker than anticipated.
Amazon projected on Thursday net sales of between $27.3 billion and $30.3 billion for the holiday quarter, which is lower than the $30.89 billion analysts had expected.
The earnings report comes almost a week after rival eBay trimmed its own full-year revenue outlook due in part to the stronger U.S. dollar, according to Reuters.
Amazon missed on virtually every metric that Wall Street tracks for the third-quarter.
"It was an ugly quarter," Plaza said.
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