Amazon disappoints on revenue forecast, warns it’s a ‘tough quarter to forecast’

We always look to Amazon. In our personal lives, it’s for dish soap, toilet paper, and Season 2 of Mr. & Mrs. Smith.

And in our professional lives here at CFO Brew, it’s for a general pulse check on the state of the economy and consumer spending, because that’s how big Amazon is.

The status report: Basically fine-ish, but there could be trouble ahead.

In Q2, total sales came in at $148 billion, jumping 10% year over year. Net income, meanwhile, came in at $13.5 billion. Investors also pay attention to Amazon’s numbers for its advertising segment—a key profit generator—and Amazon Web Services, its cloud computing unit.

Advertising brought in $12.8 billion, a slight miss from the $13 billion analysts expected, per StreetAccount data CNBC cited. On the other hand, revenue for Amazon Web Services came in at $26.3 billion, a 19% climb from last year.

Looking ahead, things get murkier. Amazon projected revenue for the current quarter to be between $154 billion and $158.5 billion. Analysts forecast $158.4, per Bloomberg data.

Personally, we liked how the New York Times chose to describe what’s happening here, with a particularly pithy headline: “Amazon Cautions That When the News Gets Nutty, People Shop Less.”

And that’s essentially what Amazon CFO Brian Olsavsky had to say in a call with reporters, per the Times. “When high profile things happen, or the assassination attempt a couple weeks ago, you’re seeing that people shift their attention to news,” he said. “This is going to be a tough quarter to forecast.”

So sure, we’ll continue to look to Amazon, but when the news gets this, umm, nutty, even the online bookstore gone wild is finding it hard to predict how much consumers will (or won’t) spend.