It’s been a rough Friday morning for Amazon, with the tech giant on pace for its worst day on Wall Street in more than a year.
A couple hours into trading on Friday, Amazon’s stock price was down 7.25% to $3,340 per share. If that holds, it’ll be Amazon’s biggest single-day drop since March 12, 2020, when the company’s share price dropped nearly 8% as fears over COVID-19 led to an overall market selloff.
What’s behind Friday’s drop? On Thursday, Amazon reported Q2 revenue of $113 billion — the company’s third straight quarter with sales of $100 billion or more — but that still came in a few billion dollars shy of what analysts had projected. Compounding matters, the company forecasted it would bring in $106-$112 billion next quarter, which was $6-$8 billion below what analysts were hoping to hear.
On the company’s earnings call on Thursday, CFO Brian Olsavsky said Amazon’s customers are now starting to do “things that probably people shied away from last year,” like going on vacation, and that tends to “lead them to do other things besides shop.”
Another problem for Amazon on Friday: The company was hit with a record $887 million fine by the European Union’s privacy watchdog for violating the E.U.’s data privacy rules. In response, Amazon said the claim is “without merit” and said it intends to fight back against the fine.
Amazon’s stock drop took the company off its track to join the $2 trillion market cap club, which only Apple and Microsoft are a part of right now. (Google, with a market cap of $1.8 trillion, is also within striking distance.) Amazon, following its Friday dip, has a market cap of $1.68 trillion.
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