Amazon Takes a Dive

Amazon stock suffered its worst day in more than 15 years on Friday, dropping 14+% and wiping away more than $206 billion in market cap. It’s the second-largest single-day decline in market cap for a US company on record, behind only Facebook’s ~$238 billion drop earlier this year.

📝 The deets…

• Amazon generated more than $116 billion in sales from January through March, a 7% YOY increase, but reported a net loss of $3.8 billion, its first quarterly loss in 7 years.
• The company attributed the loss largely to a $7.6 billion write-down of its investment in electric automaker Rivian Automotive, which has seen its stock drop more than 75% since its November 2021 IPO.
• Excluding the Rivian loss, Amazon would have made a profit of $3.8 billion. Analysts surveyed by data firm Refinitiv had forecast $4.4 billion.

📸 Big picture: Amazon acknowledged that a hiring and warehouse-building binge during the pandemic is catching up with the company as e-commerce sales growth inevitably slows from the torrid pace of the outbreak, Bloomberg reports. In addition to quoting the Foo Fighters in his first letter to shareholders earlier this month, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy wrote, “We realized the equivalent of three years’ forecasted growth in about 15 months.”

📉 Zoom out: It’s been a pretty rough year for FAANG companies.👇