The e-commerce giant reported $1.07 earnings per share for the quarter, topping the Zacks’ consensus estimate of $0.58 by $0.49. The company posted income of $857 million, up from just $92 million a year ago, easily outpacing Wall Street expectations. The cloud computing industry is growing rapidly, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that AWS is one of the fastest growing segments at Amazon.
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Amazon claims that this year’s Prime Day, on July 12, was its biggest sales day yet – 60% bigger than last year’s inaugural event.
Chief Financial Officer Brian Olsavsky said Amazon isn’t changing its investment philosophy, noting the company plans to add 18 new warehouses in the current quarter compared with six a year earlier.
The update on Amazon’s release schedule comes after a quarter that saw Amazon Studios receive 16 Emmy nominations for its original series.
The company spent $13.41 billion on fulfillment in all of 2015, up 25 percent from the prior year – and fully 13 percent of its $104.8 billion in total operating expenses.
The Seattle-based company said it had profit of $1.78 per share.
Amazon launched a two-hour grocery delivery service “Kirana Now” previous year, which was subsequently renamed “Amazon Now” as the e-commerce major found that major branded stores also joining the platform along with local kirana shops, Srivastava said. Additionally Salesforce said it had selected AWS as its “preferred” cloud provider and that it would use AWS in order to start offering the Sales Cloud customer relationship management (CRM) service out of more data center facilities around the world.
Analysts on average had expected a profit of $1.11 per share and revenue of $29.55 billion, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S. A recent report found that Amazon Video, available in the U.S., the U.K., Germany, Austria and Japan, now accounts for 4.3 percent of downstream traffic during peak evening viewing hours, trailing only Netflix and YouTube.
Amazon is working on all these efforts because Prime – along with the cloud-computing business Amazon Web Services – has become a critical moneymaker for the company. While its sales are a relatively small part of the company, the business now contributes more profits than its overall North America operations.
The spending will help Amazon increase its original video content, encouraging more customers to sign up for the $99 annual Prime membership to get the company’s entertainment programming and further distinguishing the video-streaming service from its competitors. Amazon’s turn to profitability has been largely driven by the success of Amazon Web Services.
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Operating income was $1.3 billion for the quarter, up sharply from the $464 million in the second quarter of 2015.
