Amazon reports $158B in Q3 revenue, beats Wall Street expectations

E-commerce giant Amazon.com Inc.’s third-quarter earnings, reported after the market closed Thursday, beat Wall Street expectations by providing a wider variety of goods and improving its delivery model, company officials said.

“Our team continues to focus on the inputs that matter most to customers: really broad selection, low prices, fast and free delivery, and a range of compelling Prime member benefits, including our recent additions of unlimited grocery delivery from Whole Foods Market, Amazon Fresh and local third-party grocery partners for $9.99 a month, and fuel savings of 10 cents a gallon at BP, Amoco and AMPM stations in the U.S.,” Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said during a call with analysts.

Seattle-based Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) posted earnings per share of $1.43 and $158.9 billion in revenue, beating analyst expectations of $1.14 earnings per share and $157.2 billion in revenue.

Operating income increased 55% to $17.4 billion, while net income increased to $15.3 billion in the third quarter, compared with $9.9 billion in the same period last year.

The company’s North American sales increased 9% year over year to $95.5 billion, while its international sales increased 12% year over year to $35.8 billion.

Amazon Web Services, the company’s cloud unit, reported a 19% year-over-year increase to $27.5 billion in revenue.

Jassy touted Amazon’s focus on its transportation and delivery network for the positive growth in the quarter.

“For the second year in a row, we are on track to deliver at our fastest speeds ever for Prime members globally. We also continue to focus on lowering our cost to serve and are pursuing several initiatives that we believe will have meaningful long-term impact in this area,” Jassy said. “We continue to believe there are more gains on top of what we’ve captured thus far in outbound, regionalization and getting more items closer to end consumers. As such, we’re in the process of significantly changing the way we inbound items into our fulfillment network and subsequently spread them to regional fulfillment nodes.”

Amazon’s third-quarter online store sales increased 7% y/y to $61.4 billion, beating analysts’ estimate of $59.6 billion.

Third-quarter revenue from third-party sellers services, which includes commissions collected by Amazon, fulfillment, shipping fees and other charges, grew 10% y/y to $37.8 billion.

Amazon’s guidance for the fourth quarter calls for net sales between $181.5 billion and $188.5 billion. Operating income is expected to be between $16 billion and $20 billion, compared with $13.2 billion in the fourth quarter of 2023.

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In the past few months, Amazon has made changes to its U.S. inbound network, including opening more than 15 inbound facilities, Jassy said.

“While it’s still relatively early in this re-architecture, we’ve already improved our ability to spread inventory across our fulfillment centers by 25% year over year, allowing us to have more of the requisite items and fulfillment centers closest to the customer, so we can compile shipments and ship to customers even more quickly,” he said.

Amazon aims to improve inventory placement, offer faster delivery time and cut transportation costs with the changes. The company is also planning to add more same-day delivery facilities to its network to get products to more customers.

“[Same-day delivery] is one of our lowest-cost ways to deliver,” Jassy said. “Over 40 million customers this past quarter have had their orders delivered for free with same-day delivery, which increased more than 25% year over year.”

Amazon is also using robotics to speed up deliveries, lower costs and improve its fulfillment network, he said.

“We recently launched our 12th-generation fulfillment center design for the first building in Shreveport, Louisiana,” Jassy said. “This is the first facility that incorporates our newest robotics inventions that simplify stowing, picking, packing and shipping processes. This new design reduces fulfillment processing time by up to 25%, increases the number of items we can offer for same-day or next-day delivery, and is expected to drive a 25% improvement in our cost to serve during peak within this next-generation facility.”

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