Amazon profit takes a hit

Amazon said it booked a bottom-line loss of $437 million (345 million euros) in the third quarter, compared to just $41 million in the same period a year earlier.

The loss came against a 20-percent rise in revenue to $20.58 billion, Chief Executive Jeff Bezos (pictured) said, promising customers lucrative deals during the Christmas shopping season.

But analysts remarked it might well be a "blue Christmas" for the company itself as it struggled to maintain investor confidence. Amazon's shares fell more than 11 percent in after-hours trading, signaling that shareholders were slowly losing patience with the Seattle-based Internet giant.

Give us your data!

The company said it kept investing heavily in an array of new products and services, including a new version of its Kindle tablet, its Fire smartphone and its music and video streaming platform.

Amazon had also announced the opening of data center in Frankfurt, Germany - its second in the EU after the one built in Dublin, Ireland.

Inaugurating the center, the firm spoke about meeting European customers' needs for data security and said clients could build scalable clouds on the company's Amazon Web Services (AWS) and stay entirely on the Continent, far away from US spies.

But experts warned the promise of data security was deceptive, hinting that customers' data might not be fully protected from requests for information from US authorities, although on paper such requests had to be legally binding and permitted via court orders.

hg/ng (AP, Reuters)