So much for retail therapy.
After Amazon reported a weaker-than-expected sales outlook for the third quarter on Thursday, sending its shares down more than 7% in after-hours trading, a top company executive posited a unique cause on a call with reporters.
Amazon chief financial officer Brian Olsavsky said that Amazon web traffic patterns indicate that shoppers are distracted by rare, major news events—such as the Olympics and the historically turbulent U.S. presidential race, which has already included both an assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden dropping from the race—and are potentially deferring purchases as a result, or just skipping them altogether.
Such monumental news events in the past have made it “harder to forecast,” Olsavsky said, and company leaders are once again battling with that reality. Amazon said it was forecasting between $154 billion and $158.5 billion in revenue for the current third quarter, a range that suggests sales will likely come in below the average analyst estimate of $158.24 billion.
Rather than seeking comfort in the “buy now” button, it seems that shoppers are reacting to the roller-coaster news cycle by spending less.
Amazon’s revenue in the three months ended June 30 also came in slightly below expectations at $148 billion, though earnings were stronger than expected with net profit of $13.5 billion. While the number of goods—or units—sold by Amazon in the quarter was strong, customers favored items at lower price points, according to Olsavsky and CEO Andy Jassy, who made an appearance on a conference call with analysts.
Part of that trend is the result of economic worries, the executives said they believe, but there is also another factor at play. Amazon has been investing heavily in speeding up delivery times so that customers rely on the retailer more for last-minute needs like nonperishable foods and household and beauty items that typically are inexpensive compared with other categories of products like electronics or apparel. The company is winning share in consumables, but the low average cost per transaction is weighing on revenue.
On the bright side for the company, revenue growth inside the Amazon Web Services cloud computing business continues to reaccelerate. Sales growth in the unit accelerated to 18.8%, up from 17.1% in the first three months of the year, driven by customer spending both on generative AI products and services as well as more traditional cloud infrastructure projects after a period of more cost-focused spending by AWS clients.
Jassy reiterated his revelation from last quarter that generative AI is on pace to drive multiple billions of revenue for AWS this year. To get ahead of that, and other renewed cloud demand, Amazon is on pace to spend more on capital investments in the second half of the year than the $30.5 billion it doled out in the first six months of 2024. The massive cap-ex spending is in line with rivals such Microsoft, Alphabet, and Meta, which have all reported big increases on infrastructure investments in recent quarters.
Amazon’s investments, Olsavsky said, are being made to “drive revenue and free cash flow for the next decade and beyond.”