Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is probably not a happy man today, with the company reporting disappointing fourth quarter 2011 earnings, including a dramatic 58 percent decline in net income.
Many analysts were unsure where Amazon would stand this past quarter with the launch of the hyped $199 Kindle Fire tablet. The device was estimated to not be immediately profitable for Amazon, but the company expected people to purchase media for their devices and counting on media sales to make up for it. One analyst predicted Amazon sold 6 million Fires this quarter but Amazon would not say how many units were sold.
“We are grateful to the millions of customers who purchased the Kindle Fire and Kindle e-reader devices this holiday season, making Kindle our bestselling product across both the U.S. and Europe,” said Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, in a statement. “Our millions of third-party sellers had a tremendous holiday season with 65% unit growth and now represent 36% of total units sold.”
From a revenue standpoint, the company did fairly well with $17.43 billion in sales, a 35 percent increase from the year-ago period. But the company missed wide on profits, with net income decreasing 58 percent to $177 million, or $0.38 per diluted share, compared with net income of $416 million, or $0.91 per diluted share, a year ago. Operating income for the company was $260 million in Q4, compared with $474 million in the year-ago period.
Unfortunately, even the revenues did not meet steep Wall Street expectations of $18.3 billion in revenues, according to estimates from FactSet Research.
Amazon’s stock price in after-hours trading reflected the disappointment, with the price down between 8 and 10 percent in the past half hour.
Jeff Bezos photo: James Duncan Davidson/Flickr
Filed under: VentureBeat
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