Amazon saw a healthy sale of consumers and a pick -up in his cloud computing business in the last quarter, but the company told investors on Thursday to expect the slow growth.
The turnover from October to December reached $ 187.8 billion, an increase of 10 percent compared to a year earlier. The profit increased by 88 percent to $ 20 billion. Both were in line with the expectations of Wall Street.
But the company indicated that 2025 would be a weaker start, expecting that the turnover would grow between 5 and 9 percent in the current quarter, and that the business profit could possibly be lower than a year ago.
Cloud Computing grew by 19 percent to $ 28.8 billion in the quarter. The results – seen as a sign that the investments of Amazon in artificial intelligence are bearing fruit – were particularly strong given that the best cloud competitors of the company, Microsoft and Alphabet, recently reported results that investors have impressed. In the same quarter of 2023, the Amazon cloud company grew by only 13 percent.
Investors are also focused on the Cloud Computing Business of Amazon because it has become a profit engine for the company. The operating result for the cloud company was $ 10.6 billion, which was good for half of the total business profit of Amazon.
The technical industry is shocked by the recent release of an efficient artificial intelligence system due to a Chinese start-up, deep sign. Amazon quickly made the Deepseek system available for customers to use, and said it is an example of how Amazon has built his approach to make users easily combine and match with different AI tools.
On a call with investors, Andy Jassy, Chief Executive of Amazon, said that AI should follow the pattern of other technological trends: as the systems become cheaper to implement, customers will do that 'Become enthusiastic about what else they could build that they always thought were earlier costs for costs, and they usually spend much more in total. “
The company spent $ 26 billion from building data centers, warehouses and other capital costs in the quarter, which resulted in its annual total at more than $ 77 billion. Mr. Jassy said that Amazon could have sell more cloud computing if it had more data center capacity, especially chips for AI
Amazon said investors that the current rate of capital investments would continue during 2025, which implies that it could exceed $ 100 billion this year.
Despite all the investments, Amazon finished in cash with more than $ 82 billion for the first time.
The share price of Amazon fell by more than 4 percent on the trade after hours.
The sale in the North -American retail activities of Amazon, which includes product sales and services such as advertisements and Prime memberships, grew by 10 percent in the critical holiday shop period. The retail trade generally reported surprisingly strong holiday sales.
Amazon customers buy more because the company offers faster shipping. It has reworked its activities to bring more items closer to customers, making them faster and cheaper to deliver. Amazon delivered more than nine billion items the same or the next day in 2024, an increase of more than seven billion in 2023.
The North -American operational margin from Amazon grew to more than 8 percent. Two years ago it didn't even break. The company has pressed more profit from its North -American activities by making its logistics efforts more efficient and expanding the most profitable parts of the company, such as advertisements, that surpassed $ 17 billion in sales.
The company ended the year with 1,556,000 employees, an increase of only 2 percent.
