Amazon shares jumped 10% on Thursday as the company’s third quarter numbers beat Wall Street forecasts on the top and bottom lines by a lot and by even more for the closely watched Amazon Web Services, or AWS, division.
Revenue rose 13% to $180 billion for the September quarter and jumped 20% at AWS. Total net income per share of $1.95 was a big beat including gains from investments in Anthropic.
Operating income was flat at $17.4 billion including a $2.5 billion FTC settlement and a $1.8 billion in estimated severance charges related to planned job eliminations. Those came this week when it announced a hefty 14,000 layoffs across divisions with video games among the hardest hit and departures of creative executives across Amazon MGM Studios.
Just 10 days ago, Amazon Web Services was the target of national and international ire as a major outage took down its own suite of apps and websites from Amazon Music, Prime Video and Amazon Alexa, to other major sites from Signal, WhatsApp and Snapchat to IMDb, Disney+, Fortnite, Roblox and Wordle among many others.
So the company badly needed some good at AWS, which is its window to AI. Investors were also pleased with the company’s guidance.
“We continue to see strong momentum and growth across Amazon as AI drives meaningful improvements in every corner of our business,” said CEO Andy Jassy. “AWS is growing at a pace we haven’t seen since 2022, re-accelerating to 20.2% YoY. We continue to see strong demand in AI and core infrastructure, and we’ve been focused on accelerating capacity – adding more than 3.8 gigawatts in the past 12 months.”
He said the e-commerce giant is on track “to deliver to Prime members at the fastest speeds ever again this year, expand same-day delivery of perishable groceries to over 2,300 communities by the end of the year, and double the number of rural communities with access to Amazon’s Same-Day and Next-Day Delivery.”
The company ticked off an army of bullet points as it does each quarter, now mostly around AI but with a few entertaining shout-outs.
They were: 70 million+ viewers globally The Summer I Turned Pretty Season 3 (through seven days post-finale), global viewership growth for the second consecutive season (exceeding Season 2 by 65%), and the announced feature film; kicking off the fourth season of Thursday Night Football on Prime Video, averaging 15.3 million viewers (the best for TNF on any network in a decade) according to Nielsen, which is a 16% increase over last season’s seven-game average; debuting NBA on Prime in more than 200 countries, delivering an average audience of 1.25 million viewers in the US during a season-opening doubleheader, according to Nielsen; adding Peacock Premium Plus and Fox One to Prime Video add-on subscription offerings of 100+ channels in the US; and launched the reimagined Luna cloud gaming service, including GameNight, a new collection of living room games, at no additional cost to Prime members.
Jassy Is hosting a call with analysts. at 5 pm ET.
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