Amazon's Stock Tanks After Firm Reports Huge Loss Despite Strong Sales Growth

Amazon.com's stock took a beating in late trading in New York on 24 July after America's largest online retailer reported a huge second-quarter loss and warned that losses will only grow in the third-quarter of 2014.

Amazon raked in $19.3bn (£11.4bn, €14.3bn) in revenue in the April-June second quarter, a 23% jump, but did not make any money during the period.

Amazon's shares tanked 10.62% to $320.52 in after-hours trading on Thursday. The stock has lost some 8.8% so far this year.

The firm reported a $126m loss for the second-quarter, a sharp increase from a $7m loss a year earlier.

The firm went on to forecast an operating loss of between $410m and $810m for the third-quarter ending in September, again a sharp increase from a loss of $25m a year ago.

Amazon has been investing heavily in new businesses and hardware products, such as the Fire smartphone, in a bid to compete with tech giants Apple, Google and on-demand media content provider Netflix.

Amazon Chief Financial Officer Tom Szkutak told a conference call that the firm had a "tremendous amount of opportunities" and that its investments were "certainly impacting short-term results".

Amazon CEO and founder Jeff Bezos said in a statement: "We continue working hard on making the Amazon customer experience better and better. We've recently introduced Sunday delivery coverage to 25% of the US population, launched European cross-border Two-Day Delivery for Prime, launched Prime Music with over one million songs, created three original kids TV series, added world-class parental controls to Fire TV with FreeTime, and launched Kindle Unlimited, an eBook subscription service.

"For our AWS customers we launched Amazon Zocalo, T2 instances, an SSD-backed EBS volume, Amazon Cognito, Amazon Mobile Analytics, and the AWS Mobile SDK, and we substantially reduced prices. And [on 24 July] customers all over the US will begin receiving their new Fire phones — including Firefly, Dynamic Perspective, and one full year of Prime — we can't wait to get them in customers' hands."