Amazon grew total sales in the second quarter of 2021 by 27% to $113.1 billion — a record for Q2 — but that was lighter than investors had expected, given in part that the Prime Day shopping promo occurred in the period.
The gigantic ecommerce company turned in another strong performance on the bottom line: Amazon reported net income of $7.8 billion in Q2, or $15.12 per diluted share. That’s up about 50% from $5.2 billion in the year-earlier period.
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Wall Street analysts were expecting revenue of $115.07 billion and EPS of $12.22.
Amazon said it expects sales growth to be slower in Q3 than in the current quarter, as the company battles the laws of large numbers and the surge of online orders a year ago because of the pandemic. For the third quarter, Amazon expects net sales of $106 billion-$112 billion, representing 10%-16% growth compared with the third quarter of 2020.
Shares of Amazon were down 5% in after-hours trading on the Q2 revenue miss and Q3 guidance.
Amazon in May announced a $8.45 billion bid for MGM, driven the ecommerce giant’s a desire to obtain the studio’s intellectual property and create new offshoots based on it. The proposed deal is pending regulatory approval.
On July 5, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos stepped aside as CEO, turning over the reins to Andy Jassy, previously CEO of the fast-growing Amazon Web Services (AWS) division.
In his first note to Amazon investors as CEO, Jassy noted that the COVID pandemic over the past 18 months has required the company’s consumer business “to deliver an unprecedented number of items, including PPE, food, and other products that helped communities around the world cope with the difficult circumstances of the pandemic.” He also gave a shout-out to AWS as having “helped so many businesses and governments maintain business continuity, and we’ve seen AWS growth reaccelerate as more companies bring forward plans to transform their businesses and move to the cloud.”
Underscoring Amazon’s unprecedented growth in the past year — off an already massive business — the company said it had 1.335 million employees at the end of June, up 52% year over year.
Meanwhile, last week Bezos flew into space as a billionaire space-tourist on a rocket built by his Blue Origin aerospace company.
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