Amazon Reports a Small Loss

Amazon’s razor-thin profits turned to razor-thin losses, as the Internet commerce giant continued to plow money into warehouses, digital content and other big investments.

With revenue up 22 percent, Amazon showed that the company was still able to deliver the kind of strong sales growth investors have demanded in exchange for buying its stock. So far, those demands do not include an insistence on big profits.

Until it does, Amazon seems content to pour money into initiatives aimed at gobbling up an ever increasing share of spending by consumers.

For the quarter that ended June 30, Amazon said it had a net loss of $7 million, or 2 cents a share, compared with net income of $7 million, or a penny a share, in the same period a year earlier. Amazon’s revenue was $15.7 billion, up from $12.83 billion the year before.

The results were slightly below the estimates of analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters, who expected Amazon to report earnings of 5 cents a share and revenue of $15.73 billion.

The miss did not seem to trouble investors too much. The company’s stock dropped less than 1 percent in after-hours trading after the released of its earnings report.