Amazon leaves behind the red numbers and exceeds expectations in the first quarter of the year, with revenues of 127.4 billion dollars, 9.4% more than the same period of the previous year and above the 124,700 million expected by analysts. The strong online demand and cloud services contributed to the revenue increase, indicating that the retail business is holding up better than expected to macroeconomic instability. Besides, the firm founded by Jeff Bezos returned to profitability, with a net profit of 3.2 billion dollars and earnings per share of $0.31, compared to a loss of $3.8 billion in the prior year.
“There’s a lot to like about how our teams are delivering to customers, particularly in the midst of an uncertain economy.”, he pointed out in a release Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazonexplaining that “The store business continues to improve the cost of service in our fulfillment network while increasing the speed with which we get products into the hands of customers (we expect to have our fastest Prime delivery speeds in 2023).”
The ‘crown jewel’ of the firm, its cloud services company, Amazon Web Services (AWS), also shows signs of unusual strength. Specific, AWS has increased its income by 16%, up to 21,400 million dollars. The company is looking for new sources of income to face inflation and AWS it is still one of his main muscles. For his part, he cash flow it has also grown by 38%, to 54.3 billion dollars.
«Our advertising business continues to deliver strong growth, in large part due to our ongoing investments in machine learning that helps customers see relevant information when they interact with us, which in turn delivers unusually strong results for brands. And, as our AWS business navigates more cautiously in this macro environment, businesses spend continue to prioritize building long-term customer relationships, helping customers save money, and enabling them to more easily take advantage of technologies like big language models. and generative artificial intelligence with our unique and cost-effective machine learning chips (“Trainium” and “Inferentia”), managed large language models (“Bedrock”), and AI code companion CodeWhisperer. We like the fundamentals we are seeing in AWS and believe there is a lot of growth ahead.”, he added jassy.
Forecasts for the second quarter
The company expects that second quarter revenue ranges from $127 billion to $133 billionwith an expected growth between 5 and 10%, compared to the same period of the previous year. Amazon operating income is expected to be in the range of $2 billion to $5.5 billion, compared with $3.3 billion in the second quarter of last year 2022. One of the main concerns for the company is cost cutting, and adjustment is expected staff reaches 27,000 jobs.