Amazon increases sales and profits surprisingly significantly

2023-04-28 04:05:21

In the first quarter, revenues grew by nine percent year-on-year to $ 127.4 billion (115.41 billion euros), as Amazon announced on Thursday after the US stock market closed. Operating profit increased by around 30 percent to $4.8 billion.

The lucrative cloud business around the Amazon Web Services platform, which offers companies applications and storage space on the Internet, increased revenue by 16 percent to $21.4 billion. Analysts had expected a little less. The business targets for the current second quarter also exceeded market expectations. Amazon assumes group sales of between 127 billion and 133 billion dollars. According to the company, operating profit should be between $2.0 billion and $5.5 billion.

However, the telephone conference on the quarterly figures brought investors the unpleasant realization that there was only weakened growth in the cloud business in April. The share then gave up its initial price gains of more than ten percent in after-hours trading and slipped around two percent into the red.

wave of layoffs

The first quarter was marked by major job cuts at Amazon. In March, the Internet giant announced that it would lay off a further 9,000 employees. At the beginning of the year, the group had already cut 18,000 of its more than 1.54 million jobs at the time. The wave of layoffs is intended to reduce costs, but initially cost money. According to CFO Brian Olsavsky, there were already around $470 million in severance costs in the past quarter. Overall, the number of employees fell by ten percent to 1.47 million.

Andy Jassy Amazon — Amazon-CEO Andy Jassy
Bild: (APA/AFP/GETTY IMAGES/Michael M. Santiago)

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy is moving forward in his efforts to reduce costs after spending offensive amid the pandemic online ordering boom. Operating expenses increased in the first quarter by just under nine percent – the lowest increase in at least ten years. The North American business made an operating profit of almost 900 million dollars and was in the black for the first time since 2021. A year ago, an operating loss of $1.6 billion was incurred here.