Amazon tallied big second-quarter gains in its cloud computing and advertising business, even as the tech giant faces regulatory scrutiny for its dominance of online retail sales.
Overall, Amazon’s profits gained 4 percent in the second quarter to $2.6 billion. Sales hit $63.4 billion, a 20 percent increase from the year-ago period.
Amazon missed analyst expectations of $5.54 earnings per share, as measured by S&P Global Market Intelligence, reporting profits of $5.22 a share. Profit growth slowed at Amazon’s retail operations as the company rang up higher costs than it expected for its new one-day-shipping initiative.
The Justice Department said Tuesday it was opening a wide-ranging antitrust review of “market-leading online platforms” that will focus on Amazon, Facebook and Google. A day later, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin offered support for those efforts, saying Amazon has “destroyed the retail industry.”
(Amazon founder and chief executive Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)
