E-commerce giant Amazon (AMZN) outperformed ꦛanalysts’ profit estimates for the first quarter, with North American sales driving💧 earnings higher.
Key Takeaways
- Earnings per share of $0.31 easily beat expectations of $0.22.
- North American e-commerce powered revenues, while global sales struggled on FX rates.
- AWS cloud demand was robust with 16% sales growth for the year.
The company’s shares jumped more than 6.6% after announcing a strong beat on earnings with a net income of $3.2 billion, or 31 cents per diluted share, compared with a net loss of $3.8 billion, or $0.38 per diluted share a year ago. That was much stronger than 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:analysts’ predictions of $2.39 billion, or 22 cents a share. Amazon was expected to disappoint with a slowdown in its AWS cloud services and operating income for the segment came in at $5.1 billion versus $6.5 billion in thꦑe same period🥃 a year ago, despite 16% sales growth.
Amazon posted a 9% gain in net sales to $127.4 billion, which was driven by an 11% growth in North American e-commerce sales to $76.9 billion. That helped to offset disappointing international sales which could only produce a 1% gain for the company, due to an 8% hit🌸 on unfavorable foreign exchange rates. Operating cash flow also increased 3🌸8% to $54.3 billion, compared with $39.3 billion for the trailing twelve months to the end of March.
Management also cheered investors with a sales forecast of between $127 and $133 billion for the second quarter, which was largely in line with expectations. Despite the strong operating performance, Amazon announced yesterday that it was shutting down its Halo Health service, while cutting jobs. That will add to the 18,000 jobs that were cut in January, and another 9,000 that followed last month.
Amazon was the latest big tech company to announce a larger pivot toward artificial intelligence earlier in the month with AI language models available for the AWS platform. Known as 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Amazon Bedrock, the product lets customers boost their software wit⛎h AI systems in a similar manner to OpenAI's ChatGPT chatbot🅰.