Amazon Shares Slump As Results Fall Short

Amazon shares have plunged 12% in after-hours trading as quarterly results missed Wall Street expectations.

The online retailer announced that annual sales have now topped $100bn (£69.7bn), but the latest earnings left investors unimpressed.

Amazon reported revenues for the fourth quarter of 2015 at $35.7bn (£24.9bn), 22% ahead of the same period in 2014 while profits more than doubled to $482m (£336m).

Profit for the year of $596m (£415m) was up from a loss of $241m (£168m) in 2014. Annual net sales rose 20% to $107bn (£75bn).

But quarterly earnings were held back by a surge in operating expenses and slow growth in its cloud services business.

Amazon forecast sales of between $26.5bn (£18.5bn) and $29bn (£20.2bn) for the current quarter - a rise of between 17% and 28% on the same period last year.

Despite the market's pessimism, Amazon founder and chief executive Jeff Bezos was upbeat.

He said: "Twenty years ago, I was driving the packages to the post office myself and hoping we might one day afford a forklift.

"This year, we pass $100bn in annual sales and serve 300 million customers.

"And still, measured by the dynamism we see everywhere in the marketplace and by the ever-expanding opportunities we see to invent on behalf of customers, it feels every bit like day one."

Operating expenses for the fourth quarter rose by more than a fifth to $34.6bn (£24.1bn).

Amazon has been splashing out on services for members of its $99-a-year Prime loyalty programme - or £79-a-year in the UK - including one-hour delivery and original TV programming, as it seeks to attract customers in a highly competitive marketplace.

The company dominates the $1.67trn (£1.16trn) a year global e-commerce retail market. It (Other OTC: ITGL - news) is expanding in Europe and last week said it would add 2,500 jobs in the UK this year to take the total number employed in Britain to 14,500.

Elswhere, Microsoft (NasdaqGS: MSFT - news) shares rose 5% despite the Windows maker posting falls in quarterly revenue and profit - as the figures were better than Wall Street had hoped.

The results were driven by aggressive cost-cutting and growing demand for its cloud products and services. Chief executive Satya Nadella has been focusing on cloud services and mobile applications as growth slows in its traditional software business.

Latest figures from the US tech giants come after Facebook (NasdaqGS: FB - news) saw a shares surge following better-than-expected revenues and quarterly profits more than doubling to $1.56bn (£1.1bn).

Earlier in the week there was disappointment for Apple (LSE: 0R2V.L - news) as it reported a sharp slowdown in sales growth of its iPhones and forecast a fall in volumes for the current quarter.