Amazon reports higher sales and earnings, helped by its fast-growing web services business
Amazon is rapidly automating its warehouses, raising big questions on how many workers it will need in the future
Amazon posted higher fiscal third quarter profit and sales compared with a year ago, fuelled by accelerating growth in its cloud computing business and strong spending by its customers looking for low prices at a time when inflation is resurging.
The results, announced Thursday, beat Wall Street expectations. The company’s prominent cloud computing arm also surpassed analysts’ expectations, rising 20 per cent. But Amazon issued a cautious sales outlook for the fiscal fourth quarter.
Shares, however, soared nearly 13 per cent in after-hours trading.
Analysts are analysing Amazon’s results, along with other retailers’ earnings performances, to get insight into how shoppers are spending heading into the holiday season and how the online behemoth is managing cost increases from President Donald Trump’s tariffs.
But Amazon, based in Seattle, is also under pressure to shore up confidence among investors that its computing arm Amazon Web Services is just as powerful as Microsoft’s Azure and Google’s Google Cloud platform. Amazon delivered better-than-expected 20 per cent growth for AWS, following a 17.5 per cent growth in the fiscal second quarter. Andy Jassy, president and CEO of Amazon, noted in a statement that AWS is growing at a pace it has not seen since 2022.
Last week Amazon grappled with a massive outage of AWS after a problem disrupted internet use around the world for most of the day, taking down a broad range of online services, including social media, gaming, food delivery, streaming and financial platforms.
