线上销售额创新高 为何亚马逊股价不涨反跌？

今年的感恩节后首个星期一——“网络星期一”，美国电商亚马逊网站有好些商品促销。Fire笔记本电脑只要33.33美元，智能家居语音助手Echo Dot也只要39.99美元。那天亚马逊还有一样降价出售：股票。

本周一，亚马逊股票每股下跌12美元，跌幅1.5%，收报每股768美元。和不到两个月前847美元的近期高点相比，其股价已经下跌将近80美元。分析师此前预计，“网络星期一”亚马逊的销售额有望创新高，达到33亿美元，较去年同期增长将近10%。亚马逊的股价却下跌了。

到底哪出了问题？

沃尔玛之类传统零售巨头增长近10%可以说不错，但对亚马逊而言增速略显缓慢。今年第四季度亚马逊的销售额预计同比增长25%。由于投资者预期业绩会大幅增长，亚马逊市值已达3650亿美元，过去12个月市盈率高达176倍。因此，10%的增长实际上很令人失望。

去年以沃尔玛为首的一众零售业巨头越来越重视线上销售。今年沃尔玛和塔吉特为了抗衡亚马逊，在“黑色星期五”和“网络星期一”两天折扣力度都很大。研究机构Market Track根据假日宣传广告分析发现，今年感恩节后促销季中沃尔玛的平均折扣为39%，去年为35%。塔吉特的平均折扣38%，也高于去年的36%。

巨头围攻压力下，亚马逊只能跟着打折。亚马逊表示，本周网站有7.5万件打折商品。不过这次投资者押注亚马逊能将庞大的销售收入转化为利润，今明两年将分别盈利48亿美元和69亿美元。

好在亚马逊增长最快的业务——网络服务并不依赖“网络星期一”的流量，至少和亚马逊网站的流量没有直接关系。但网络服务毕竟只占亚马逊业务约10%。如果已然四面受敌的亚马逊遭遇更多线上价格战，下跌的股价可能就不是折扣而是实在的亏损了。（财富中文网）

译者：Pessy

审校：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.