Amazon’s Supercharged Growth Is Gone
The compensation is a sea of profits, at least by its parsimonious standards.
An e-commerce demigod performs like a mere mortal.
Photographer: Bess Adler/BloombergAmazon.com Inc. confirmed on Thursday what has been a slowly evolving financial picture. It is now a company that is more profitable than it has been in years, but the supercharged growth is gone.
Investors knew this change was happening, but it’s still odd to see it in black and white. Amazon said Thursday that its rate of revenue growth in the first quarter was 17 percent, the slowest rate since an awful patch for the company four years ago. The number of individual items sold on Amazon, excluding its Whole Foods supermarket, increased 10 percent from a year earlier. Just one year ago, that growth rate was 22 percent.