線上銷售額創新高 為何亞馬遜股價不漲反跌？

今年的感恩節后首個星期一——“網絡星期一”，美國電商亞馬遜網站有好些商品促銷。Fire筆記本電腦只要33.33美元，智能家居語音助手Echo Dot也只要39.99美元。那天亞馬遜還有一樣降價出售：股票。

本周一，亞馬遜股票每股下跌12美元，跌幅1.5%，收報每股768美元。和不到兩個月前847美元的近期高點相比，其股價已經下跌將近80美元。分析師此前預計，“網絡星期一”亞馬遜的銷售額有望創新高，達到33億美元，較去年同期增長將近10%。亞馬遜的股價卻下跌了。

到底哪出了問題？

沃爾瑪之類傳統零售巨頭增長近10%可以說不錯，但對亞馬遜而言增速略顯緩慢。今年第四季度亞馬遜的銷售額預計同比增長25%。由于投資者預期業績會大幅增長，亞馬遜市值已達3650億美元，過去12個月市盈率高達176倍。因此，10%的增長實際上很令人失望。

去年以沃爾瑪為首的一眾零售業巨頭越來越重視線上銷售。今年沃爾瑪和塔吉特為了抗衡亞馬遜，在“黑色星期五”和“網絡星期一”兩天折扣力度都很大。研究機構Market Track根據假日宣傳廣告分析發現，今年感恩節后促銷季中沃爾瑪的平均折扣為39%，去年為35%。塔吉特的平均折扣38%，也高于去年的36%。

巨頭圍攻壓力下，亞馬遜只能跟著打折。亞馬遜表示，本周網站有7.5萬件打折商品。不過這次投資者押注亞馬遜能將龐大的銷售收入轉化為利潤，今明兩年將分別盈利48億美元和69億美元。

好在亞馬遜增長最快的業務——網絡服務并不依賴“網絡星期一”的流量，至少和亞馬遜網站的流量沒有直接關系。但網絡服務畢竟只占亞馬遜業務約10%。如果已然四面受敵的亞馬遜遭遇更多線上價格戰，下跌的股價可能就不是折扣而是實在的虧損了。（財富中文網）

譯者：Pessy

審校：夏林

Amazon.com has dozens of deals on items this Cyber Monday. You could pick up a Fire tablet for just $33.33 or the Echo Dot for $39.99 Also on sale this Cyber Monday, it seems: Amazon’s shares.

Shares of the online retailer slipped $12, or 1.5%, to $768 on Monday. The stock is now down nearly $80 from its recent high of $847 less than two months ago. The drop in shares of Amazon AMZN -1.79% come as analysts are saying that this Cyber Monday is expected to be the biggest ever, hitting a record $3.3 billion in sales, up nearly 10% from a year ago.

So what gives?

Well, while near 10% growth sounds good, and would be great for a giant traditional retailer like Walmart WMT -0.06% , it would actually be relatively slow for Amazon. Sales at the online retailer are expected to rise 25% in the fourth quarter from a year ago. The expectation of huge sales growth is built into Amazon’s enormous stock market valuation of $365 billion, or 176 times its last 12 months of earnings. So a 10% jump would actually be a big disappointment.

In the past year, giant retailers, Walmart in particular, have put more and more emphasis on growing their online sales. Walmart and Target TGT -1.13% this year offered bigger discounts on Black Friday and Cyber Monday to combat Amazon. Research firm Market Track, based on holiday circulars, found that Walmart was offering an average discount of 39% this year, up from 35% last year. Target is offering average discounts of 38% during the post-Thanksgiving shopping spree, vs. 36% a year ago.

This is forcing Amazon to match as well. It says it is offering deals on 75,000 items on its website this week. And this comes at a time when investors are betting that Amazon will be able to turn its massive sales into profit, as much as $4.8 billion this year, and $6.9 billion next.

The good news is that the fastest growing portion of its business, web services, is not as dependent on Cyber Monday traffic, or at least traffic directly to Amazon. Still that only makes up about 10% of Amazon’s total business. And if the company increasingly finds itself in even more of an online price war than its already in, investors may not be getting much of a discount on the company’s shares at all.