Indie station "besieged" middle-aged Amazon
Since the beginning of this year, Amazon's e-commerce has been "misfired" continuously. In the just-released third-quarter financial report, Amazon's quarterly profit fell 9% year-on-year, and almost none of its key financial indicators met market expectations, causing its stock price to plummet by nearly 20% in the following days, evaporating nearly $200 billion in market value.
If you want to sum up the reasons for Amazon’s slump in one sentence, it can be: the e-commerce business has stagnated or even expanded its losses, AWS, as the main source of profits, has slowed down in growth and its profitability is not as good as before.
If it is said that from last year to the first quarter of this year, Amazon can also be said to be due to the epidemic, supply chain and other issues leading to the weakness of e-commerce, but since this year, Amazon's e-commerce sector has delivered disappointing results for three consecutive quarters Even the magnitude of the landslide is still increasing.
Why is the e-commerce business of the "king of e-commerce" now a money-losing item that drags Amazon down? In addition to the macro factors of the downturn in the economic environment, to a certain extent, Amazon may now face the same "generational dilemma" as Meta.
Stalled e-commerce, no more glory Since this year, Amazon's e-commerce has been mediocre. In the first quarter, online store sales fell by 3% year-on-year, with a loss of US$2.84 billion in the North American base and international markets (profit of US$4.7 billion in the same period in 2021).
Losses, the international market suffered losses for three consecutive quarters, setting the worst growth rate in 20 years. Although the overall performance in the second quarter was boosted by AWS, if you look closely, you will find that Amazon's online store business fell by 4% year-on-year again, the overall operating loss in North America and international markets is still more than 2 billion US dollars, Prime membership growth rate Still hovering in the low 10% range.
At that time, Amazon said that sales in the third quarter would be very optimistic, and that it expected revenue growth of 13% to 17%, driven by Prime Day, and revenue could reach $130 billion. Image via geekwire, produced by quarterly Amazon earnings reports However, judging from this quarter's results, Prime Day didn't save Amazon.
Although the overall revenue has entered the forecast space of the previous quarter, and the growth rate of online stores has changed from negative to positive, the soaring cost has caused Amazon's profit to decline instead of rising.
Among them, several figures worth noting are that the loss in the North American market has expanded to 412 million US dollars, and the loss in the global market has increased by 171% compared with the same period last year. In the first few months of 2022, global operating income fell 61.1% year-on-year, with a net loss of $3 billion, compared with $19.04 billion in global operating profit just a year ago.
This year, in order to boost e-commerce business, Amazon even launched two Prime Day events for the first time. However, according to the statistics of Similarweb, the effect of the second Prime Day that just ended not long ago may be far less effective than expected.
