Amazon had a stellar first quarter. The company reported net income of $513 million, or $1.07 earnings per share on $29.1 billion in net sales.
The performance beat analyst expectations of 58 cents per share on net revenue of $27.98 billion in Q1 2016. Last year, Amazon reported a net loss of $57 million, or 12 cents a share, on $22.7 billion in net sales.
Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon, touted the success of several Amazon devices, including Echo.
“Amazon devices are the top selling products on Amazon, and customers purchased more than twice as many Fire tablets than first quarter last year,” said Bezos in a statement. “Earlier this week, the $39 Fire TV Stick became the first product ever — from any manufacturer — to pass 100,000 customer reviews, including over 62,000 5 star reviews, also more than any other product ever sold on Amazon. Echo too is off to an incredible start, and we can’t yet manage to keep it in stock despite all efforts. We’re building premium products at non-premium prices, and we’re thrilled so many customers are responding to our approach.”
That said, Amazon’s cloud business is driving the revenue gains. Amazon’s web services (AWS) segment generated $604 million in operating income in Q1 2016 (a gain of 201 percent year over year) on revenues of $2.57 billion — above analyst expectations of $2.53 billion.
The stock was trading up 12 percent. In an eye-popping stat, Marketwatch noted at 4:17 p.m. ET that in less than 20 minutes, the 82.9 million shares that Bezos owns had gained about $6.1 billion in value.
Amazon says it expects to see net sales between $28.0 billion and $30.5 billion — a year-over-year increase of between 21 percent and 32 percent — in the second quarter of 2016.
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