Amazon shares soar as it shatters Wall Street forecasts
Amazon’s shares jumped over six per cent in after-hours trading after the e-commerce giant breezed past third quarter expectations.
The boost from investors would lift the Seattle-headquartered company’s market cap, which currently stands at $1.95t, beyond the $2t mark.
It posted quarterly revenue of $158.9bn (£123.3bn), beating analyst predictions of $157.2bn (£121.9bn), and a year on year rise of 11 per cent.
Net income grew to $15.3bn (£11.9bn), up from $9.9bn (£7.7bn) in the same period last year, and far north of analyst estimates of $12.2bn (£9.5bn).
As it heads into the lucrative holiday season Amazon has forecast net sales of between $181.5bn (£140.7bn) and $188.5bn (£146.1bn) in the current quarter, in line with analyst expectations.
Its key cloud business Amazon Web Services (AWS) saw a 19 per cent rise in revenue as businesses deepened their reliance on cloud services amid digital transformation.
Amazon boss Andy Jassy hailed AI as a “maybe once-in-a-lifetime opportunity” for AWS, that Amazon is “aggressively pursuing.” He added AWS already has a “multibillion-dollar” AI business with triple digit revenue growth.
The strong results also come thanks to progress from Amazon’s raft of artificial intelligence exploits that it has been developing this year.
Wedbush analyst Dan Ives said this week that, for investors, the focus remains on the “monetisation of AI” spreading across the tech landscape.
“The next few weeks will be the linchpin to confirmation that the AI ‘use case phase’ have now begun within the enterprise world,” he added.
Microsoft and Meta both failed to impress investors when they reported earnings yesterday.