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Amazon beat Wall Street’s overall expectations with $187.8 billion in net sales, up 10%, and came in well ahead on the bottom line, with earnings of $1.86 per share, vs. expectations of $1.48 for the fourth quarter.
Quarterly profits surpassed $20 billion for the first time, up more than 88% from a year ago. The results for the quarter included the e-commerce giant’s sales from the 2024 holiday shopping season.
However, growth in the closely watched Amazon Web Services cloud unit was slightly lower than expected, with sales of $28.8 billion, an increase of just under 19%, compared with expectations of 19.3% in advance of the report.
That makes for a trend in the cloud industry. Amazon’s biggest rivals in the cloud, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, both posted revenue growth below Wall Street’s expectations in their most recent reports.
Although AWS sales ($28.8 billion) accounted for just 15% of Amazon’s total sales ($187.8), the cloud unit’s operating profits ($10.6 billion) continued to make a huge difference in the company’s profitability — representing more than 50% of Amazon’s overall operating profits of $21.2 billion for the quarter.
Amazon shares slipped more than 4% in after-hours trading.
Here are the top-line results from Amazon’s other major business units:
Net sales in the company’s Online Stores business was $75.5 billion, up 7.1%.
Third-party seller services sales were nearly $47.5 billion, up 9%.
Revenue from advertising was $17.3 billion, up nearly 18%.
Revenue from subscriptions, including Prime, was $11.5 billion, up 9.73%.
Physical stores remain a small portion of Amazon’s business, with revenue of $5.6 billion for the quarter, up 8% year-over-year.
The company reported 1,556,000 full- and part-time employees as of Dec. 31, up 2% year-over-year. This number does not include contractors or temporary personnel hired for seasonal work.
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