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Amazon warned of the impact of Donald Trump’s global trade war and issued weaker than expected guidance for the second quarter, as the ecommerce giant grapples with steep tariffs.
The Seattle-based group on Thursday said it expected operating income of between $13bn and $17.5bn in the current quarter. That compares with $14.7bn a year ago but fell short of Wall Street’s forecast of $17.7bn.
In financial guidance, Amazon added “tariff and trade policies” to the list of factors that posed a risk to its earnings.
Chief executive Andy Jassy told investors that the company was well positioned to weather the storm and had engaged in forward buying of inventory ahead of the Trump administration this month imposing tariffs on Chinese imports of up to 145 per cent.
“We haven’t seen any attenuation of demand yet,” he said, and that average selling prices had not risen appreciably with tariffs. “There’s going to be plenty of sellers that [will] decide to pass on those higher costs to consumers.”
Amazon has been negotiating steep discounts with vendors and seeking to damp the impact of tariffs. It imports roughly a quarter of items it sells from China.
Goldman Sachs analysts said ahead of Amazon’s results that the levies could knock $5bn-$10bn off the company’s operating profits this year, depending on how the trade war played out. That would represent a hit of 6-12 per cent on the $79.2bn in fiscal year operating profit that Wall Street has forecast.
Amazon also forecast net sales in the current quarter to come in between $159bn and $164bn, with the bottom range falling short of analysts’ expectations of $161.4bn.
Shares in the company were down 2.3 per cent in after-hours trading in New York, having closed the regular session 3.1 per cent higher.
Amazon’s March quarter revenues rose 9 per cent year on year to $156bn, narrowly beating estimates of $155bn, according to consensus estimates from S&P Visible Alpha.
The group’s vast ecommerce platform continued to grow in the first quarter. Net sales in its online retail division were up about 5 per cent from a year ago.
Amazon this week locked horns with the US government after it emerged that its ultra-low-cost Haul platform had discussed listing import charges on consumer products, in a move similar to Chinese rival Temu.
Haul, which ships goods from warehouses in China, will be affected by the removal of tax exemptions for goods valued at less than $800, from May 2.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt on Tuesday said the proposals were a “hostile and political act” by Amazon. The group publicly walked back the proposal after Trump spoke with its founder Jeff Bezos.
Amazon’s cloud division, which is the biggest contributor to profit, narrowly missed expectations but continued to show signs of strong growth. Sales at Amazon Web Services, which operates data centres and offers customers software tools, rose 17 per cent to $29.3bn, but fell slightly short of consensus estimates of $29.4bn.
The company spent $24.3bn on capital expenditure in the first quarter, up from $13.9bn the previous year. It plans to spend $100bn in capex this year, directing most of its investment towards AI initiatives.
Jassy said new semiconductor chips from Nvidia and Amazon’s own Trainium 3 would land in the coming months, but that the company faced data centre capacity constraints due to shortages of motherboards and other components.
Revenue from the company’s fast-growing advertising business rose 18 per cent to $13.9bn.
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