After a series of layoffs and losses, things seem to be picking up for Amazon. In the last quarter, the e-commerce giant grew by 9 %, and profits are back up as well.
Stable e-commerce
Amazon was able to publish surprisingly strong quarterly results, with sales reaching 127.4 billion dollars (115 billion euros), well above analysts’ forecasts. Online sales remained stable, which is a feat in itself as at the beginning of last year, many countries were still under Covid restrictions, which led to exceptional growth in e-commerce.
For profits and growth, Amazon has to rely on its other businesses: at its AWS cloud services, revenue grew by 16 % despite a slowdown in growth. April had already seen a sharp slowdown as economic uncertainty drove customers to seek cheaper alternatives to store their data. Nevertheless, the advertising category generated 9.7 billion dollars in revenue and grew by 21 %.
After a 3.8 billion dollar loss a year ago, Amazon is back above zero: the quarter ended with a profit of 3.2 billion dollars. According to CFO Brian Olsavsky, the US labour market is calming down, which has helped to reduce transportation and personnel costs. Amazon has also cut 27,000 jobs in recent months and does not rule out the possibility of further waves of layoffs.
