(Reuters) -Shares of Amazon.com fell more than 8% on Friday after the online retailer reported slowing online sales growth in the second quarter and said consumers were seeking out cheaper options for purchases.
The commentary from the online shopping behemoth is in line with recent value-conscious consumer behaviour, ahead of retail giant Walmart’s quarterly results later this month.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said on a post-earnings call that customers were trading down on price when they could.
The company’s shares were trading at about $169 before the bell. Amazon was set to lose about $157 billion in market value, if the losses hold.
“Consumer spending trends facing retail peers appear to have finally caught up with Amazon’s P&L,” MoffettNathanson analyst Michael Morton said.
Amazon’s online stores sales rose 5% in the second quarter to $55.4 billion, compared with growth of 7% in the first quarter.
The company’s quarterly profit and cloud computing sales, however, beat analysts’ estimates.
Revenue at Amazon Web Services, its cloud unit, rose a better-than-expected 19% to $26.3 billion, days after Microsoft’s cloud division Azure fell short of market estimates and sparked more concerns around Big Tech’s hefty AI spend.
Seattle-based Amazon is playing catch up with rivals Microsoft, which partners with OpenAI, and Google in developing its own so-called large language models that can respond nearly instantly to complicated queries or prompts.
Amazon’s forward price-to-earnings ratio for the next 12 months, a common benchmark for valuing stocks, was 33.92, compared with Alphabet’s 20.46 and Microsoft’s 30.88, according to LSEG data.
(Reporting by Amanda Cooper in London and Savyata Mishra and Deborah Sophia in Bengaluru; Editing by Alun John and Shounak Dasgupta)
