(New York) Amazon has signed, like its major competitors, a first quarter above expectations, which confirms the recovery of the group’s trajectory, in a difficult economic context, which encourages managers to remain vigilant on costs.
Over the period from January to March, turnover reached 127.3 billion dollars, up 9% year on year and significantly above the 124.6 billion expected by analysts.
After initially welcoming the release in early post-close email exchanges, Wall Street eventually corrected the issue and put the stock under pressure. It was yielding more than 2% after gaining more than 10%.
The New York marketplace raised Amazon’s second-quarter revenue forecast to a range of $127 billion to $133 billion, slightly better than analysts’ projections of $129.8 billion.
Quarter-on-quarter, AWS revenue even fell slightly (-0.1%).
“Clients continue to look for ways to optimize their cloud spend to weather the tough economic conditions,” Chief Financial Officer Brian Olsavsky said on the earnings conference call.
The executive revealed that remote computing saw a growth rate in April that was 5 percentage points lower than the already decelerating first quarter.
“This stronger than expected performance from the two key profit centers of AWS and advertising indicates that the company may have raised the bar,” commented Andrew Lipsman, analyst at Insider Intelligence.
These numbers make up for zero growth in online sales, which have been stalling for more than a year.
Furthermore, “recent cost-saving measures appear to be producing improvements in profitability,” noted Andrew Lipsman.
Amazon has notably decided to cut 27,000 jobs in total. At the end of March, the group’s workforce was 10% lower than the same period last year, at 1.46 million employees.
“We are making progress in modifying our cost structure and bringing it back to its pre-pandemic levels”, described Brian Olsavsky, referring in particular to the redesign of the mesh of Amazon’s delivery services in order to optimize travel.
The company’s net profit reached 3.1 billion in the first quarter, compared to a net loss of 3.8 billion in the same period last year.
Reported by share, data scrutinized by the market, the profit is 31 cents, well above the 21 cents announced by analysts.
“For the first time in several quarters, Amazon finally seems to have some wind at its back,” according to Andrew Lipsman.
During the conference call, CEO Andy Jassy touted Amazon’s massive investment in artificial intelligence (AI), which has been on everyone’s lips since the launch of the ChatGPT interface in November.
“Language models [that enable content generation] take years to build and billions of dollars” of investment, the official argued. “And there will only be a handful of companies willing to invest that much time and money, Amazon being one of them. »
Andy Jassy also talked about AI about connected devices, which the group wants to use to create “the best personal assistant in the world”, a philosophy already embodied by the Alexa assistant. “I think there is a significant business model behind it. »