Amazon Reports Best Quarterly Profit Ever

Amazon.com Inc. reported the largest quarterly profit in its 19-year history as a public company, as more consumers eschew brick-and-mortar retail for the convenience of ordering goods and services from their couch.

However, shares of Amazon, which have more than doubled over the past year, fell 13% to $555 in after-hours trading as the company's results were below analyst expectations.

The Seattle online retailer posted a 22% gain in sales and more than doubled its net income. The period marked a big shift from just over a year ago when Amazon turned in its biggest quarterly loss in 14 years.

While physical retail stagnates, Amazon has captured more customers by aggressively building out new warehouses near urban centers to speed deliveries and by bulking up its Prime unlimited shipping membership with streaming video and other benefits. And it has built up a huge lead on rivals in offering cloud computing services through its lucrative Amazon Web Services unit.

Amazon recorded $35.75 billion in sales in last year's final three months, up from $29.3 billion in the year-earlier period. Its $482 million in profit, or $1 a share, compares with $214 million, or 51 cents a share, a year earlier and surpasses the $416 million it posted in the fourth quarter of 2010.

Analysts, however, were expecting $36 billion in sales and net income of $754 million, or $1.56 a share.

For the current first quarter, Amazon sees sales between $26.5 billion and $29.0 billion, straddling the average analyst estimate of $27.65 billion among analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters.

By contrast, eBay Inc. on Wednesday said it failed to improve sales during the holiday season and issued a weak outlook for the coming quarter.

Amazon's AWS division, which rents computing power to other companies from thousands of servers, saw sales jump 69% to $2.4 billion and operating profits rise to $687 million from $240 million, reinforcing its place as Amazon's fast-rising growth engine. Still, results fell below expectations. Analysts were forecasting revenue gains of at least 70%; Raymond James, for instance, projected a 73% rise.

Amazon has in recent months announced new AWS data centers in Ohio, China, the U.K., South Korea and India, highlighting the global ambition of the division and its widening lead on rivals Microsoft Corp. and Alphabet Inc.

Amazon is still spending heavily on its business. The company's operating costs rose 20.5% to $34.6 billion from $28.7 billion a year earlier.

Write to Greg Bensinger at [e-mail]

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

January 28, 2016 16:45 ET (21:45 GMT)

Copyright (c) 2016 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.