Amazon had a great e-commerce quarter, but AWS‘ growth was strong to pad the bottom line.
Amazon raked in fourth quarter earnings and sales as the company took retail share to handily top estimates. Yet, operating income for its e-commerce units in U. S. and international were well below Amazon Web Services.
The company said net income for the fourth quarter was $1.9 billion, or $3.75 a share, on revenue of $60.5 billion, up 38 percent from a year ago. The fourth quarter earnings got a boost from a tax benefit of $789 million.
Wall Street was looking for fourth quarter earnings of $1.85 a share on revenue of $59.83 billion.
For 2017, Amazon reported net income of $3 billion, or $6.15 a share, on revenue of $177.9 billion, up 31 percent a year ago.
While the numbers from Amazon’s e-commerce operations were impressive, the cash cow remains Amazon Web Services. Consider:
In other words, on an annual basis all of Amazon’s operating income derives from AWS.
As for the outlook, Amazon projected sales between $47.75 billion to $50.75 billion with operating income between $300 million and $1 billion. That wide range compares to $1 billion in operating income in the first quarter of 2017.
CEO Jeff Bezos in a statement talked up Alexa’s ecosystem and that the company will „double down“ on the personal assistant. „We’ve reached an important point where other companies and developers are accelerating adoption of Alexa. There are now over 30,000 skills from outside developers, customers can control more than 4,000 smart home devices from 1,200 unique brands with Alexa, and we’re seeing strong response to our new far-field voice kit for manufacturers,“ said Bezos.
Other key figures:
