As Amazon gears up for the holiday season, Boardroom breaks down its financial outlook based on the Big Tech firm’s Q3 earnings report.
It has been a big week for Big Tech companies with Q3 earnings calls underway.
Boardroom is rounding out earnings coverage this week with key findings from Amazon’s financial outlook.
The e-commerce giant generated $143.1 billion in overall revenue for the quarter, a 13% increase year-over-year. Amazon beat analysts’ projections across the board on revenue and sales after it was estimated only to bring in $141.1 billion. The company has the cloud game on lock with Amazon Web Services (AWS), too, which produced $23.1 billion in revenue, a 12% increase year-over-year. AWS’s revenue blew Microsoft and Google’s cloud businesses out of the water, which generated $24.3 billion and $8.4 billion, respectively.
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Amazon’s positive Q3 report comes a year after increased inflation and rising interest rates. Last year was a difficult one for the company, which led to Amazon laying off more than 27,000 workers in the first two quarters of 2023. The company’s major cost-cutting efforts seem to be benefiting its economic stability overall.
“We had a strong third quarter as our cost to serve and speed of delivery in our stores business took another step forward, our AWS growth continued to stabilize, our advertising revenue grew robustly, and overall operating income and free cash flow rose significantly,” Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said in a statement.
Amazon’s stock jumped as much as 3% on Thursday after the company reported its earnings.
More insights from Amazon’s recent earnings report:
- Thanks to the holiday season, Amazon expects sales to land in the $160 billion to $167 billion range next quarter.
- Amazon’s advertising sector saw a nice boost with $12.1 billion in revenue, an increase of 26% year-over-year.
- Quarterly profits hit $9.9 billion for the quarter compared to $2.9 billion in Q3 2022.
- Sales in North America climbed by 11% year-over-year to $87.9 billion. International sales also increased 16% year-over-year to $32.1 billion.
- Amazon Prime Video attracted 15.1 million viewers for its Thursday Night Football (TNF) season opener, and through the first six games, TNF averaged 12.9 million viewers.
For details on Meta, Alphabet, Microsoft, and Snap‘s earnings this week, check out Boardroom’s latest Big Tech Earnings Roundup.
How Amazon is Delivering the Future
Amazon has been open about the tech it’s implementing in its fulfillment centers to innovate its e-commerce offerings and delivery processes. The tech firm is gearing up to hire 250,000 full-time, part-time, and seasonal employees. Additionally, it is investing another $1.3 billion in the US to meet hourly employee pay demands.
Amazon is dipping its toes in AI as well. Most notably, its larger investment in robotics is putting it ahead of the wave when it comes to mobilizing emerging technologies. During my time in Seattle last week, the Big Tech firm doubled down on its plans to use tech and robotics to work alongside humans in its warehouses. As I previously noted in Boardroom Tech Talk, Amazon employs over 750,000 robots worldwide to work alongside its employees.
During Amazon’s “Delivering the Future” event, I got a close-up look at what the company is building to serve customers, employees, and communities better. By the way, Amazon has a Seattle fulfillment center dedicated to robotics research and development. The company uses this space to test new tech to implement into its warehouse operations. That’s the facility I spend most of my time in during my trip. I teased some of my findings in Tech Talk, including Amazon’s new drone delivery service, electric vehicle deployment, and its new packaging methods, but I wanted to hone in on Amazon’s partnership with Agility Robotics. The company is working on implementing its bipedal humanoid robot, digit, into Amazon’s operations. Digit is a mobile robot that can move around, bend up and down, and reach and grasp items.
Digit robots are designed to work in spaces and buildings where humans are also working, and they can even work collaboratively with employees. To start, Amazon will be using Digit robots to pick up and move empty inventory containers, a repetitive task that can easily be taken care of by a machine that only needs to be charged to do it.
Can you envision Digit taking someone’s job? From what I saw on the ground, the robots don’t move as quickly as I envisioned they would. Plus, there is still a lot Amazon needs to test before implementing them in warehouses alongside employees.
Stay tuned to see what else Amazon is doing with robotics.
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