Amazon slides as it misses on Q4 earnings, gives downbeat profit guidance
The tech giant also forecast it would spend $200 billion on capex in 2026.
Amazon shares slid after the company missed Wall Street’s expectations for fourth-quarter earnings, gave downbeat first-quarter profit guidance, and forecast a whopping $200 billion of capital expenditure this year.
The stock was down 9% in recent after-hours trading.
For the fourth quarter, Amazon’s earnings per share came in at $1.95, falling short of analysts’ consensus estimate of $1.97, according to FactSet.
Sales grew 14% to $213.4 billion, ahead of analysts’ expectations of $211.43 billion.
The tech giant also forecast first-quarter operating income of $16.5 billion to $21.5 billion, well below the Wall Street forecast for $22.18 billion. It sees sales landing between $173.5 billion and $178.5 billion, compared with analysts’ expectations for $175.62 billion.
Amazon’s AWS cloud business saw revenue jump 24% year on year to $35.6 billion, powered by huge demand for AI. The Street was expecting $34.9 billion.
The company’s capital expenditure — a number that’s been watched closely in recent quarters as tech giants spend vast sums of money to build the infrastructure to power AI — totaled $39.5 billion, topping analysts’ forecasts of $34.37 billion.
Amazon continued a trend of Big Tech companies laying out plans for monster capital spending, saying it expects to invest about $200 billion in capital expenditure this year.
On the earnings call, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said that the company had a backlog of $244 billion worth of AWS revenue, up 40% year over year.
Some highlights for the quarter:
The Trainium and Gravitron custom AI chips have a combined annual revenue of over $10 billion, growing fast.
Trainium4 chips are expected to start delivery in 2027.
Physical-store sales came in at $5.85 billion.
Advertising revenue was $21.37 billion, up 23% year on year.
Subscription revenue (Amazon Prime, audiobooks, etc.) was up 14% year on year, at $13.1 billion for the quarter.
Last week, Amazon announced it would reduce its corporate workforce by an additional 16,000 employees, after laying off 14,000 workers in October.
Go Deeper: For hyperscalers like Amazon, how much capex is too much?
