Weird consistency... Four quarters in a row Amazon has set record profits and slowed its revenue growth — Having already Primed most Americans and lots of Europeans, growth is bound to slow. Investors were glad it's wringing more profit juice from every eBuck. Here's how the money math worked out last quarter:
- Revenues rose 19%
- Costs only rose 13%
- Profits more than doubled to $3.6B
Strengths, weaknesses, and teases... Investors weren't overly impressed or upset. So they nudged shares up half a percent higher.
- 👨🦳 Old bets: Amazon.com ecommerce sales rose 10%, while Whole Foods and Amazon Go physical sales crept up 1%.
- 👧 New bets: Advertising is big now for Amazon, but it rose just 34% after almost doubling last quarter.
- 🇨🇳 China rewind: Amazon failed in China by ending its 3rd party marketplace because nobody was using it (Alibaba and JD.com already won there). International sales rose just 9% overall.
- 😍 OMG-OMG-OMG: The CFO said Amazon's working on cutting free delivery time in half from 2 days to 1 day for Prime members.
AWS is still profit puppy #1... Amazon started building cloud services (aka renting out computer storage/power) back in '06. Few companies today don't use cloud, and most use Amazon Web Services (Apple pays Amazon $30M per month on it). AWS profit just hit $2.2B — Almost 2/3 of Amazon's total. Microsoft and Google are slowly catching up, but Bezos should promote the palm reader who helped him greenlight AWS 13 years ago.