Amazon saw a pickup on healthy consumer sales and cloud computing business in the recent quarter, but the company told investors on Thursday to expect growth to slow down in the future.
Revenue from October to December reached $187.8 billion, up 10% from the previous year. Profits rose 88% to $20 billion. Both were pretty much in line with Wall Street's expectations.
However, the company expects sales to rise from 5% to 9% in the current quarter in 2025, and expects operating profits to be lower than a year ago. indicates.
Cloud computing rose 19% in the quarter to $28.8 billion. The results, which are considered as indications that Amazon's investment in artificial intelligence has paid off, are particularly given that its top cloud competitors Microsoft and Alphabet recently reported overwhelming results by investors. It was powerful. In the same quarter of 2023, Amazon's cloud business grew by just 13%.
Investors are also focusing on Amazon's cloud computing business. This is because it has become a profit engine for the company. Cloud business's operating profit was $10.6 billion, accounting for half of Amazon's overall operating profit.
The high-tech industry is being shaken up by the recent release of efficient artificial intelligence systems by Chinese startup Deepseek. Amazon says it is an example of how Amazon has built an approach to easily combine and match a variety of AI tools, bringing customers to the DeepSeek system quickly It has been made available.
In a call with investors, Amazon's CEO Andy Jassy said AI should follow other patterns of technical trends. Previously it was banned, and they usually end up spending more money in total. ”
The company spent quarterly building up $26 billion of data centers, warehouses and other capital expenses, bringing its annual total of more than $77 billion. Jassy said that if Amazon had more data center capacity, especially AI chips, it could have sold more cloud computing.
Amazon told investors that its current capital investment rate will continue throughout 2025 and suggests it could surpass $100 billion this year.
Despite all the investments, Amazon finished the year with more than $82 billion in cash for the first time.
Amazon's stock fell more than 4% in after-hours trading.
Amazon's North American retail sales included products sales and services such as advertising and Prime membership, up 10% over key holiday shopping periods. The retail industry has generally reported surprisingly strong holiday sales.
Amazon customers are buying more because the company offers faster delivery. It's faster and cheaper to start and deliver businesses to get more items closer to our customers. Amazon delivered over 7 billion to over 9 billion items in 2023, the same or the next day.
Amazon's North American operating profit margin increased to over 8%. Two years ago it didn't even break. The company has been able to narrow more profits from its North American businesses by making it more efficient in logistics efforts and expanding the most profitable portion of its business, including advertising that surpasses $17 billion in sales. I did.
The company finished the year with 1,556,000 employees, up just 2%.
