Amazon announced its fourth quarter results, earning a net profit of $1.9 billion ($3.75 per share), with a 38% jump in revenue, touching $60.5 billion.
Like Microsoft, Amazon too beat the Wall Street’s expectations, who had forecasted a profit of $1.85 per share on revenue of $59.83 billion. The retail giant had posted a revenue of $43.7 billion for third quarter that ended on 30th September, 2017.
Once again, AWS, the cloud unit of Amazon, helped the tech giant bolster its revenue and profit. While the overall net income of Amazon was $1.9 billion, AWS held more than 70% of it, earning operating income of $1.35 billion.
In the fourth quarter 2017, AWS had $5.11 billion in sales, which was 17% rise from the same quarter in 2016. AWS accelerated its pace of innovation, releasing around 500 new services and features during the fourth quarter.
The re:Invent Conference of AWS took place in the fourth quarter, where AWS launched several services under its cloud unit. The services and products announced during the event included DeepLens and SageMaker, which made it easier for developers and scientists to use machine learning expansively.
AWS announced Amazon EC2 C5 instances, in collaboration with Intel to deploy Xeon Scalable CPUs.
During the year, AWS expanded its infrastructure to best serve customers, launching a new region in France, and another AWS region in China. It is planning to open 12 more Availability Zones across four regions between 2018 and early 2019.
Apart from the cloud unit, Amazon generated revenue from e-commerce, and its television network, Amazon Prime Video. Its North America e-commerce business delivered income of $1.69 billion on revenue of $37.3 billion. Amazon shipped more than five billion items with Prime worldwide.
Also read: AWS acquires cybersecurity startup Sqrrl to strengthen its public cloud security
The fourth quarter 2017 results also include tax benefit of approximately $789 million from the U.S. Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) of 2017.
