Amazon share price soars 15pc as sales and earnings smash expectations
The figures
Amazon smashed analysts' expectations, with a $23.18bn revenue over the quarter. Analysts had high hopes for Amazon’s sales, with forecasts of a 16 per cent jump in sales, and even so, the company managed to out-do them.
Earnings per share came in at $0.19, against expectations of a $0.13 loss.
The company’s share price has climbed 35 per cent over the year, rising 25 per cent in the past three months alone, and after its earnings were released, shares soared by 15 per cent in after-hours trading.
Why it's interesting
It seems the hotly-anticipated Prime Day sale delivered for the company’s shareholders. With the new one-day sale promising to be “bigger than Black Friday”, analysts have estimated that it added $1.2bn in revenue.
Investors will also have been watching rapidly growing cloud-computing business Amazon Web Services, which Amazon only started breaking out figures for last quarter. Revenue for this segment was projected to grow a whopping 50 per cent over the quarter.
What they said
Chief executive and founder Jeff Bezos had plenty to be happy about:
The teams at Amazon have been working hard for customers. We unveiled Amazon Business, opened Amazon Mexico, launched Prime free same-day, rolled out our ninth Prime Now city, broke our Black Friday record with the first-ever Prime Day, received 11 Emmy nominations for Transparent, debuted six new kids pilots, brought Echo to general availability, introduced the Alexa Skills Kit and Alexa Voice Service, opened FBA Small and Light, continued to double down on our fastest growing geography — India, launched 350 significant AWS features and services so far this year (ahead of last year’s pace), introduced AWS Educate, and entered into agreements for new solar and wind farms — enough to exceed our 2016 goal of 40% renewable energy.
In short
These strong results should leave investors feeling happy, particularly about Amazon's cloud-computing services in particular, where analysts are predicting "dramatic" growth to come.