01/30/2020
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01/30/2020
Amazon performed much better than expected in the last quarter of 2019, thanks to a “record” holiday season. The action of the online distribution giant jumped nearly 12% on Thursday just after the announcement.
Revenues stood at $ 87.44 billion in the last three months of the year, an increase of 21% compared to the same period of 2018, according to a press release from the group founded by Jeff Bezos. Wall Street was expecting just over $ 86 billion. Earnings per share far exceeded expectations at 6.47 dollars against 4.04 expected, according to Factset. Net profit increased 10% to $ 3.3 billion.
Last year, Amazon had promised to deliver even faster the members of its Prime offer, which includes free and overnight delivery on many of the products sold by the giant of online distribution, or its video offer in streaming, for 119 dollars per year in the United States.
It was attractive enough to explode demand, said Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. “We have never seen so many people subscribe in a quarter and we now have 150 million paying Prime members worldwide,” he said in a statement. That’s 50 million more than a year ago.
For the 1st quarter of fiscal year 2020, Amazon expects sales to increase from 16 to 22%, between 69 and 73 billion dollars.
Cloud war
The AWS division, which regroups activities in off-premises or “cloud” computing, and which is one of the main growth engines of the company, saw its turnover increase by 34% at the end of the year to some $ 10 billion.
This is a strong increase, but less spectacular than in the previous quarter (+ 45%) and above all less strong than that of Microsoft’s Azure division, its rival in this very lucrative business sector (AWS represented 67% of operating profit, according to Patrick Moorhead, analyst at Moore Insight & Strategy).
Last fall, this division won a coveted Pentagon contract worth $ 10 billion. The JEDI (Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure) contract, which spans ten years, aims to modernize all the computer systems of the American armed forces in a system managed by artificial intelligence.
Amazon, which was also in the running, is contesting this attribution to its rival, arguing that Donald Trump has lobbied for the group founded by Jeff Bezos not to benefit from the public windfall. The President hates the Washington Post, which Jeff Bezos owns.
ats, dpa
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