Seattle, Washington-based Amazon reported second-quarter profit of $857 million or $1.78 per share, up from $92 million or $0.19 per share previous year. This week, Prime launched in India, the second most-populous country in the world, and came to Belgium in February.
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AWS combined with enthusiastic take-up of its premium “Prime” service to generate better than expected revenue for the second quarter of the year. Net income was $857 million, compared with $92 million in the year-ago period.
Looking forward to the third quarter, the company expects sales of $31.0 billion to $33.5 billion.
“In the United Kingdom we recently announced plans to create a further 1000 permanent jobs across Britain this year, on top of 2500 permanent roles previously announced in January, as we prepare for the festive season”, a spokesman for Amazon said.
Rival Alphabet, owner of Google, also posted a strong rise in profits aided by a surge in ad sales on mobile devices.
One reason the big boost was enjoyed by the company was its Amazon Web Services cloud computing, which provides its customers with access to the power of computing over the Web.
Amazon chief and founder, Jeff Bezos has become the world’s third richest person, thanks to the company’s robust earnings and an uptick in the stock. Last year, the company hit $100 billion in annual sales for the first time.
Cloud revenue growth slowed somewhat from the 64 percent rate in the first quarter and 70 percent for all of previous year, but Amazon’s cloud business is no so large that maintaining such stratospheric growth is nearly impossible.
Operating income for AWS in the Q1 quarter was $604 million and accounted for more than half of all of Amazon’s operating income.
But analysts at Consumer Intelligence Research Partners estimated Amazon Prime now has 63 million USA members, spending on average about US$1,200 per year, compared to about US$500 per year for non-members. AWS launched its Asia Pacific (Mumbai) Region, the sixth AWS Region in Asia Pacific.
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Buffett has donated about $2.2 billion worth of stock this month to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
