Amazon’s Q3 2016 sales up 29% at $32.69 billion, but stock tanks more than 5%

Amazon ($AMZN) today announced the results of its third quarter financial earnings, in which it generated $32.7 billion in revenue. By all accounts, Wall Street analysts expected the online retail marketplace to pull in $32.69 billion in revenue. The company’s sales figure is up 29 percent from a year ago.

This quarter, its earnings per share were $0.52, but analysts had expected $0.78. This discrepancy has caused shareholders to panic a bit, and shares in the company closed down 0.51 percent at $818.36. In after-hours trading, they’re currently down nearly 6 percent.

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In a statement, Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos said: “Alexa may be Amazon’s most-loved invention yet — literally — with over 250,000 marriage proposals from customers and counting. And she’s just getting better. Because Alexa’s brain is in the cloud, we can easily and continuously add to her capabilities and make her more useful. Wait until you see some of the surprises the team is working on now.”

As for its Amazon Web Services offering, the company shared that it brought in $3.2 billion in revenue, which is an increase of 55 percent year over year.

The majority of Amazon’s $32.69 billion in sales came from products ($22.3 billion), as opposed to services. Its North American segment continues to bring in more sales ($18.88 billion) versus overseas ($10.61 billion), but both markets are seeing double-digit percentage growth over the past year. Not surprisingly, electronics and other general merchandise resonates with consumers and dominated net sales worldwide.

The past quarter has been a busy one for Amazon, filled with development of new original series, the launch of a on-demand music streaming service, an updated version of its Echo Dot device powered by Alexa, the addition of more skills to the virtual assistant platform, the introdution of new games produced through Amazon Game Studios, a refreshed Prime Photos service, the launch of a Fire HD 8 tablet, and more.

And as we approach the holiday season, the company shared that it expects to create 120,000 seasonal jobs within its customer fulfillment and support areas. The people fitted to these slots can sometimes become full-time employees — Amazon claimed that last year it moved 14,000 seasonal hires into regular, full-time roles, and the company believes it’ll likely help more workers out this year.

It declined to provide numbers relating to Prime membership or how many Alexa-powered devices it has sold.

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