What happened
Shares of Amazon.com (AMZN -3.06%) were up 11.2% as of 11:02 a.m. ET Friday, according to data provided by S&P Global Market Intelligence, after the e-commerce and cloud computing giant announced better-than-expected second-quarter 2023 results.
Amazon's quarterly net sales climbed 11% year over year to $134.4 billion, well above both Amazon's guidance (which called for a range of $127 billion to $133 billion) and analysts' consensus estimates calling for $131.6 billion. Operating income also more than doubled from last year's second quarter, to $7.7 billion. On the bottom line, that translated to net income of $6.7 billion, or $0.65 per share, well above estimates for $0.35 per share and swinging from a loss of $0.20 per share in the same year-ago period.
So what
Amazon's growth was broad-based, with North America segment sales up 11% to $82.5 billion, International sales up 10% to $29.7 billion, and sales from its Amazon Web Services (AWS) business up 12% to $22.1 billion.
"It was another strong quarter of progress for Amazon," said Amazon CEO Andy Jassy. "We continued lowering our cost to serve our fulfillment network, while also providing Prime customers with the fastest delivery speeds we've ever recorded."
Jassy added that growth from AWS "stabilized as customers started shifting from cost optimization to new workload deployment," helped by "a slew of generative AI releases that make it much easier and more cost-effective for companies to train and run models."
Now what
For the third quarter, Amazon expects net sales of between $138 billion and $143 billion, good for growth of between 9% and 13% year over year. Amazon also anticipates operating income of between $5.5 billion and $8.5 billion, up from $2.5 billion a year earlier.
All things considered, this was a solid quarterly beat complemented by strong forward guidance. And Amazon stock is simply responding in kind.
