Amazon.com delivered a mixed picture in its quarterly report published on Thursday after the market closed: the group reported an unusual drop in sales for its core business in online trading, but growth in the cloud computing division accelerated.

Amazon's stake in electric-car maker Rivian, which went public in November, also helped it post record earnings.

Roland Lindner

Business correspondent in New York.

  • Follow I follow

The news was generally well received on the stock exchange, with the share price temporarily rising by 18 percent in after-hours trading.

In regular trading, the share had previously lost 8 percent in value.

Amazon was in a similar position to many other tech companies whose shares came under pressure after a disappointing earnings report from internet giant Meta.

Internet companies such as Snap and Twitter had to accept particularly significant price losses.

However, Snap, like Amazon, reversed the trend again on Thursday after the market closed.

After better-than-expected quarterly figures, the course even rose by more than 50 percent after the trading hours.

Amazon reported revenue growth of 9 percent to $137.4 billion for the final quarter of 2021, about in line with analysts' expectations.

Net income nearly doubled to $14.3 billion, thanks to a $11.8 billion special gain from the Rivian investment.

Operating profit, on the other hand, almost halved to $3.5 billion.

Chief Executive Andy Jassy said in a statement the company suffered from higher costs last quarter due to staff shortages and general inflation.

Price increase on Prime

Amidst these challenges, Amazon has now announced that for the first time since 2018 it will increase the price of its Prime loyalty program, which offers subscribers faster shipping without additional costs and access to a video service comparable to Netflix, among other things.

In America, the annual fee for Prime will now be raised from $119 to $139.

Netflix also recently announced a price increase here.

Amazon's weak point in the past quarter was online trading, which is all the more remarkable because the reporting period includes the important Christmas business.

This time sales shrank here by one percent to 66.1 billion dollars.

Once again, the group has convinced with its cloud division Amazon Web Services (AWS).

It brought in sales of $17.8 billion, up 40 percent year-on-year, the strongest growth in several quarters.

AWS provides computing capacity and related services to companies that want to move their information technology to the Internet.

Poor prognosis

The division's business is above-average profitable.

Operating profit rose 49 percent to $5.3 billion, higher than the group as a whole.

This means that all other divisions together were in deficit.

AWS's handsome profits are also notable in that Google, one of the biggest competitors in the business, reported a loss for its cloud division this week.

For the first quarter of this year, Amazon predicts sales of 112 billion to 117 billion dollars.

That was slightly below analysts' expectations and would represent growth of 3 to 8 percent over the past year.

So Amazon is preparing for a further weakening.