Amazon‘s fourth-quarter report was a beat across the board, but first-quarter revenue guidance came in below estimates. Amazon stock rose as much as 3 percent after hours before settling to a slight gain.
Here are the most important numbers:
- EPS: $6.04 vs. $5.68 estimated, according to Refinitiv
- Revenue: $72.4 billion vs. $71.9 billion estimated, according to Refinitiv
- AWS: $7.43 billion vs. $7.3 billion estimated, according to Refinitiv
First-quarter revenue is expected to be between $56 billion and $60 billion, slightly below FactSet estimates of $60.8 billion.
Revenue for the fourth-quarter was up 19.7 percent, the lowest growth since the first-quarter of 2015. Amazon finished the year with $232.9 billion in annual revenue, passing the $200 billion milestone for the first time Cash and equivalents jumped 51 percent to $21 billion.
North American sales grew only 18 percent year-over-year, a steep deceleration compared to the year-ago period’s 42 percent growth. International sales also slowed down to 15 percent compared to the previous year’s 29 percent growth rate. AWS, meanwhile, continued to see strong results, growing 45 percent from last year.
Operating income is expected to be between $2.3 billion and $3.3 billion for the first quarter, compared with the year-ago period’s $1.9 billion.
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos highlighted the success of the Alexa voice-assistant in the earnings release.
“Alexa was very busy during her holiday season. Echo Dot was the best-selling item across all products on Amazon globally, and customers purchased millions more devices from the Echo family compared to last year,” Bezos said in a statement.
The fourth-quarter is typically the largest for Amazon because it includes the holiday shopping season.
Amazon has seen a huge boost in profitability in recent years, after seeing growth in businesses like cloud, advertising and the third-party marketplace, where margins are bigger but sales are smaller. Amazon is historically known for running on thin margins because it reinvests most of its profits back into the company.
Amazon stock is up 18 percent over the past year. Its market cap, more than $840 billion as of Thursday afternoon, is the largest of any publicly traded company in the world.
