Very different results came from the technology sector on Thursday after the market closed.

The electronics group Apple has significantly exceeded expectations thanks to continued good business with its iPhone, but also warned of burdens from bottlenecks in supply chains and the recently tightened corona restrictions on the important Chinese market.

The online retailer Amazon.com delivered mixed figures and also gave a cautious outlook for the coming quarter.

Apple's share price initially rose in after-hours trading, but then turned negative.

The Amazon share temporarily lost 12 percent in value.

Roland Lindner

Business correspondent in New York.

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Amazon reported first-quarter sales growth of 7 percent to $116.4 billion, which was about in line with expectations.

The company posted a net loss of $3.8 billion, which can be explained by the decline in the value of its stake in electric car maker Rivian.

However, operating profit has more than halved to $3.7 billion.

"This has been a tough quarter for Amazon," said Insider Intelligence analyst Andrew Lipsman.

In a statement, CEO Andy Jassy addressed challenges such as high inflation rates and supply chain difficulties.

Chief Financial Officer Brian Olsavsky said the effect of inflation added $2 billion to Amazon's costs.

Weak point online trade

As in the final quarter of 2021, the core business in online trading was the weak point in the group, with sales shrinking by 3 percent.

The big bright spot was Amazon Web Services, the division for cloud computing.

Its revenue rose 37 percent to $18.4 billion, down slightly from 40 percent growth in the previous quarter.

AWS has once again underscored its importance as the group's top earner.

Operating profit was $6.5 billion, which means that without the division, this key figure would have been negative for the entire group.

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

The group is the market leader here, its main competitors are Microsoft and Google.

Amazon's advertising business is also growing and profitable.

Here, sales increased by 23 percent to $7.9 billion, which, however, also meant a slowdown in growth compared to the final quarter of 2021.

Other technology groups such as Google holding company Alphabet and Meta have also reported lower growth in their advertising business in the past few days.

For the second quarter, Amazon is predicting sales of between $116 billion and $121 billion, which would represent year-over-year growth of 3 to 7 percent.

Analysts had expected an average of $125 billion.

For operating income, Amazon gave a very wide range, ranging from a loss of $1 billion to a profit of $3.0 billion.

Strong increase in sales despite supply chain problems

Apple reported sales growth of 9 percent to $ 97.3 billion for the past three months, analysts had expected an average of $ 93.4 billion.

The company posted net income of $25.0 billion and earnings per share of $1.52 were 9 cents better than expected.

Apple is also struggling with difficulties in the supply chain, especially when it comes to semiconductors, and the recent corona lockdowns in China are currently posing an additional challenge.

CFO Luca Maestri estimated in a conference call that this will cost Apple between $4 billion and $8 billion in revenue in the next fiscal quarter.

In addition, the cessation of business in Russia will reduce sales growth by 1.5 percentage points.

iPhone business better than expected

In the past quarter, sales of the iPhone, Apple's most important product by far, rose by 5 percent to $50.6 billion.

That exceeded analysts' expectations.

There was also growth in almost all other categories.

In the services business, which is now the second-largest division and includes offers such as the App Store, the payment service Apple Pay and the video platform Apple TV+, sales increased by 17 percent to $19.8 billion.

In the division with products such as the Apple Watch digital clock and the wireless Airpod headphones, there was an increase of 12 percent to 8.8 billion dollars.

Sales of Macintosh computers rose 15 percent to $10.4 billion.

Only the iPad tablet computer was down, with sales falling 2 percent to $7.6 billion.

Target acquisitions

Apple announced an additional $90 billion in share buybacks and a 5 percent increase in dividends when it released the numbers.

One analyst questioned whether Apple could use its ample funding to make a larger acquisition like video service Netflix, whose share price has fallen significantly since the start of the year.

CEO Tim Cook said I'm always looking at Apple for acquisitions and I'm not averse to larger acquisitions.

"I don't want to go through my list right now."