Amazon today reported the financial results for its first quarter ended March 31, 2023. Amazon’s quarterly revenue increased 9% to $127.4 billion, while the net income was $3.2 billion, compared with net loss of $3.8 billion in first quarter 2022. Amazon’s revenue increase was supported mainly by two of its businesses, AWS and Ads. The ad revenue grew 21% YoY to $9.5B in this quarter while AWS revenue increased 16% to $21.4 billion. AWS business operating income was $5.1 billion, making it a significant contributor to Amazon’s overall net income.
Amazon offered the following guidance for next quarter:
- Net sales are expected to be between $127.0 billion and $133.0 billion, or to grow between 5% and 10% compared with second quarter 2022. This guidance anticipates an unfavorable impact of approximately 30 basis points from foreign exchange rates.
- Operating income is expected to be between $2.0 billion and $5.5 billion, compared with $3.3 billion in second quarter 2022.
“Our Advertising business continues to deliver robust growth, largely due to our ongoing machine learning investments that help customers see relevant information when they engage with us, which in turn delivers unusually strong results for brands. And, while our AWS business navigates companies spending more cautiously in this macro environment, we continue to prioritize building long-term customer relationships both by helping customers save money and enabling them to more easily leverage technologies like Large Language Models and Generative AI with our uniquely cost-effective machine learning chips (“Trainium” and “Inferentia”), managed Large Language Models (“Bedrock”), and AI code companion CodeWhisperer. We like the fundamentals we’re seeing in AWS, and believe there’s much growth ahead,” said Andy Jassy, Amazon CEO.
