MARKET - Amazon Reports Q4 Sales up 38% to US$60.5B

Amazon Q4 Performance Drives Market to US$1,477.10 per Share in After Hours Trading

The Amazon webcast earlier this afternoon was an inspiring performance for this Ecommerce giant. The links to the press release and webcast are available at the bottom of this article.

Financial Highlights from the webcast:

• Common shares outstanding plus shares underlying stock-based awards totaled 504M on December 31, 2017, compared with 497M one year ago.
• Net sales increased 38% to US$60.5B in Q4, compared with US$43.7B in Q4 2016.
• Operating income increased 69% to US$2.1B in Q4, compared with operating income of US$1.3B in Q4 2016.
• Net income was US$1.9B in Q4, or $3.75 per diluted share, compared with net income of US$749M, or $1.54 per diluted share, in Q4 2016. [Includes a provisional tax benefit of the U.S. Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 of approximately US$789M]
• Net sales increased 31% to US$177.9B in 2017, compared with US$136.0B in 2016.
• Operating income decreased 2% to US$4.1B in 2017, compared with operating income of US$4.2B in 2016.
• Net income was US$3.0B, or $6.15 per diluted share in 2017, compared with net income of $2.4B, or $4.90 per diluted share, in 2016.

Other Webcast highlights:

• More than five billion items shipped with Prime worldwide in 2017.
• More new paid members joined Prime in 2017 than in any previous year — both worldwide and in the U.S.
• Fire TV Stick and Echo Dot were the best-selling products in 2017 across all of Amazon.
• Amazon launched new ways for developers to earn money building for Alexa, including paid skill content through in-skill purchasing, premium subscription content, and a more frictionless checkout experience with Amazon Pay.
• The Alexa Skills store now offers more than 30,000 skills, including new developer tools for Alexa Gadgets.
• Customers now use Alexa to control more than 4,000 smart home devices from 1,200 unique brands.
• Amazon also introduced new tools and developer kits, including the Alexa Mobile Accessory Kit and Alexa Premium Far-Field Voice Development Kit, to make it easier for developers to bring Alexa to more devices.
• Amazon hired nearly 130,000 employees globally in 2017, excluding acquisitions.
• Amazon welcomed several new device makers to the Dash Replenishment program that enables smart appliances to automatically reorder consumables when supplies run low, including 3M, Hewlett-Packard, Kenmore, and Bluestream. 
• Amazon launched two furniture brands: Rivet, offering affordable and versatile mid-century modern furniture ideal for smaller spaces; and Stone & Beam, offering durable and stylish furniture for the modern household.
• Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) shipped billions of items for small and medium-sized businesses, worldwide in 2017.
• Prime selection in India now offers members more than 25 million local products from third-party sellers.
• Amazon celebrated its 10th holiday season of Frustration-Free Packaging — an invention designed to reduce waste and delight customers with easy-to-open, 100% recyclable packaging. Amazon’s sustainable packaging innovations have helped to eliminate nearly 215,000 tons of packaging material and 360 million boxes.
• Amazon Go, a new kind of store with no checkout required, is now open to the public in Seattle. The checkout-free shopping experience is made possible by the same types of technologies used in self-driving cars: computer vision, machine learning, and sensor fusion.
• Amazon Web Services (AWS) now operates 52 Availability Zones across 18 infrastructure regions globally.
• AWS continues to accelerate its pace of innovation with the release of 497 significant new services and features in the fourth quarter, bringing the total number of launches in 2017 to 1,430.
• AWS introduced four Artificial Intelligence (AI) services that allow developers to build applications that emulate human-like cognition: Amazon Transcribe for converting speech to text; Amazon Translate for translating text between languages; Amazon Comprehend for understanding relationships and finding insights within text; and Amazon Rekognition Video, a deep-learning powered video analysis service that tracks people, detects activities, and recognizes objects, celebrities, and inappropriate content.
• AWS launched Alexa for Business, a new service that brings Alexa into the workplace to help employees be more productive and organized on both personal and shared Echo devices by simply using their voice. Employees can use Alexa for Business to find an open conference room, make phone calls, check calendars, schedule and start meetings, manage to-do lists, set reminders, and even find information in popular business applications like Salesforce, Concur, or Splunk.

“Our 2017 projections for Alexa were very optimistic, and we far exceeded them. We don’t see positive surprises of this magnitude very often — expect us to double down,” said Jeff Bezos, Amazon founder and CEO. “We’ve reached an important point where other companies and developers are accelerating adoption of Alexa... Much more to come and a huge thank you to our customers and partners.”

Q4 Press Release

Q4 Webcast Replay and Slides

Eight minutes with Jeff Bezos Recorded in 2009


About Amazon:
Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon.