Amazon significantly increases sales and profits Israel remains on the ground offensive – the night update without photos

Amazon significantly increased sales and profits last quarter thanks to its commerce business and cloud division. Sales grew by 13 percent year on year to 143.1 billion, Amazon announced after the US stock market closed on Thursday.

Ultimately, profit rose to $9.9 billion from $2.9 billion a year ago. In the AWS cloud division, revenue rose twelve percent to $23.1 billion. That was roughly in line with analysts’ expectations, although some of them expected more given the rise of artificial intelligence.

At the same time, AWS significantly increased its operating profit from $5.4 to $7 billion. That was considerably more than the market expected. Amazon competes with Microsoft and Google in the cloud market.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy highlighted progress in the AWS business in a conference call with analysts, even as some companies wanted to save money. Various new customer contracts have been concluded, which will come into effect this month. Jassy was convinced that the boom in artificial intelligence software will also drive demand for cloud services.

Share Tesla competitors

A $1.2 billion increase in the valuation of Amazon’s stake in electric carmaker Rivian also contributed to the gain. The share in the Tesla competitor, which also supplies thousands of electric vans to Amazon, has repeatedly ruined the trading group’s quarterly figures in recent years with value adjustments. Amazon shares rose by more than five percent in after-hours trading on Thursday.

Jassy had significantly reduced costs and expanded its advertising business in addition to the cloud. Amazon wants to become a strong player in so-called generative AI, he emphasized. This is an umbrella term for programs such as the chatbot ChatGPT, which can formulate sentences at human level, but also for software that can sometimes create deceptively real images from text descriptions. Amazon recently started offering retailers the ability to have images of their products captured in different environments using AI software. AI technologies could bring tens of billions of dollars in additional revenue to AWS over the years, Jassy said. (sda/dpa)