Amazon reported a huge beat across the board for its first-quarter earnings on Thursday, with particular growth coming from its AWS cloud service and advertising business.
Amazon stock is up roughly 7 percent in after-hours trading, soaring past its all-time high.
Here are the most important numbers:
- Revenue: $51.04 billion vs. $49.78 billion, as estimated, according to Thomson Reuters
- EPS: $3.27 per share vs $1.26 per share, as estimated, according to Thomson Reuters
- AWS revenue: $5.44 billion vs. $5.25 billion, as estimated, according to FactSet
Amazon’s revenue, which includes sales from Whole Foods, increased 43 percent year-over-year. Its North America revenue jumped 46 percent to $30.7 billion, while international sales grew 34 percent to $14.8 billion.
Net income more than doubled to $1.6 billion, underscoring the company’s renewed focus on growing profit margins.
AWS sales grew 49 percent year-over-year, reaccelerating its growth rate, which had dropped to as low as 42 percent in the third quarter of last year. It generated $1.4 billion in operating income, accounting for 73 percent of Amazon’s total operating income.
In a prepared statement, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos highlighted the massive success of AWS.
“AWS had the unusual advantage of a seven-year head start before facing like-minded competition, and the team has never slowed down,” said Bezos. “As a result, the AWS services are by far the most evolved and most functionality-rich.”
Amazon’s “other” revenue, which primarily comes from its advertising business, saw a whopping 139 percent increase from last year, generating $2.03 billion in sales.
Its subscription services revenue, which includes Prime memberships, also grew 60 percent to $3.1 billion. Amazon disclosed for the first time last week that Prime had more than 100 million members worldwide.
Separately, Amazon also announced it would raise the price of Prime membership by 20 percent to $119 a year. It also extended its streaming partnership with the NFL until 2019.
Amazon gave second-quarter revenue guidance in the range of $51.0 billion to $54.0 billion, in-line with street estimate of $52.2 billion. Operating income is expected to fall between $1.1 billion and $1.9 billion, far-exceeding the $1.01 billion street estimate.
“At first glance, we are quite frankly flabbergasted by Amazon’s 1Q 2018 results,” Anthony Chukumba of Loop Capital wrote in a note after the earnings.
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