The Seattle-based Web retailing giant said it earned $16 million, or 4 cents a share. It lost $35 million, or 9 cents a share, a year earlier.
Excluding certain one-time items, Amazon.com (AMZN: news, chart, profile) earned $48 million, or 11 cents a share, topping analyst forecasts by a penny a share. Some investors, however, expected Amazon to report a profit as high as 13 cents a share. In the year-ago period, Amazon broke even on a pro forma basis.
Shares of Amazon.com fell 2 percent to $57.44 in after-hours trading action.
Amazon.com ended the regular session with a modest loss of 24 cents at $59.35. But investors bid up shares to over $61, on optimism that Amazon would have a surprisingly strong report.
Quarterly sales grew to $1.13 billion from $851 million last year, falling short of high-end projections of $1.2 billion.
Giving a fourth-quarter outlook that tops current estimates is essential in extending stock gains. Founder and CEO Jeff Bezos suggested that a healthy online shopping season was in store.
"Thanks to free shipping and low prices, we expect more customers to turn to us for their holiday gifting needs this year--producing our biggest holiday shopping season ever," Bezos said in a news release.
Looking ahead, Amazon.com said that it expects fourth-quarter sales growth of 24 to 34 percent. That means revenue could hit $1.76 billion or as much as $1.91 billion in the quarter.
Operating income is expected to be between $110 million and $140 million.
Amazon's new sales goals is slightly better than the current consensus revenue growth rate of 25 percent in the fourth quarter. If Amazon's revenue grows at that clip, sales will reach $1.78 billion in the last three months of this year, up from $1.428 billion the comparable period last year.
Amazon also gave an outlook for 2004. The company expects sales to be between $5.75 billion and $6.25 billion. Currently, analysts expect Amazon to earn 88 cents a share on sales of $6.1 billion next year.
Bambi Francisco is Internet editor of CBS.MarketWatch.com, based in San Francisco
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