Amazon announced on Thursday its largest quarterly profit ever during April-June, at $2.5 billion (Rs 17,161 crore) – almost 12 times the profit it reported in the same period last year. The company had clocked $1 billion in profits for the first time in October-December 2017.
The growth in profits was largely driven by the company’s cloud-computing business, Amazon Web Services, whose revenue rose as much as 49% to $6.1 billion, CNBC reported. The e-commerce segment had a revenue of $46.78 billion, slightly lower than market estimates of $47.37 billion. The segment’s operating profit, however, exceeded expectations massively, coming in at $1.34 billion, against the projected $240 million, MarketWatch reported.
The company forecast strong sales in autumn, just a day after Facebook lost nearly a quarter of its share value due to slow growth projections. Amazon’s shares rose more than 3% in the extended trading on Thursday.
“A big contributor to the quarter and the last few quarters obviously has been strong growth in our highest profitability businesses and also advertising,” Brian Olsavsky, Amazon’s chief financial officer, said. “We’ve seen a greater-than-expected efficiency in a lot of our spend in things like warehouses, data centres, marketing.”
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