Amazon Reports Staggering First Quarter Financial Results

Amazon reported its best first quarter financial results ever with its earnings more than tripling the company’s results from the first quarter of 2020.  While comparing first quarter 2020 financial results with first quarter 2021 financial results is like comparing apples and oranges when it comes to on-line retail sales, Amazon’s financial results are still quite impressive as noted below.

• Net income increased to $8.1 billion in the quarter ended March 31, or $15.79 per diluted share, compared with $2.5 billion, or $5.01 per diluted share in the first quarter of 2020.
• Amazon’s profits in the year since the pandemic started have now exceeded $26 billion, more than the previous three years combined
• Operating income increased to $8.9 billion, compared with $4.0 billion last year.
• Net revenue increased 44% to $108.5 billion
• Year-over-year net sales growth was 40% in North America, compared to 29% in the year-ago period, and 60% growth internationally, up from 18% last year
• Amazon’s Web Services growth was pegged at 32%.
• North American e-commerce sales in the quarter totaled $64.37 billion, up from $46.13 billion a year ago
• Operating profit from North American sales totaled  $3.45 billion, up from $1.31 billion the year before
• First-quarter international sales totaled $30.65 billion, up from $19.11 billion a year ago
• Amazon posted operating profit of $1.25 billion from international sales, after reporting a loss of $398 million in the year-ago period.
• Amazon’s cloud-computing business, AWS, remains a major profit center. It posted net sales of $13.5 billion in the quarter, up 32% from last year.  AWS operating profit was  $4.16 billion, up from $3.08 billion a year ago.

With the continuing growth of on-line sales we expect Amazon to continue to achieve these incredibly impressive financial results.  Amazon in fact expects their net sales in the second quarter to fall between $110.0 billion and $116.0 billion, or to grow between 24% and 30%, compared with the second quarter of 2020.

Not sure if there is a coincidence in timing here, but Amazon released its first-quarter earnings on the same day it revealed that it would spend $1 billion to increase the pay of its more than 500,000  U.S. operations employees.

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