(San Francisco) After Google and Meta (Facebook) last week, Amazon posted better-than-expected second-quarter profits, and the satisfied market is now focusing its attention on its generative AI efforts.
The e-commerce giant announced on Thursday that it had achieved 134.4 billion dollars in turnover and a net profit of 6.7 billion, figures up sharply over one year and well above its own forecasts as well as those analysts.
The group benefited in particular from a strong recovery in sales in the United States.
The e-commerce platform saw revenue grow 11% to $82.5 billion in North America. It generated 3.2 billion in operating profit, instead of a loss of several hundred million in the same period last year.
Andy Jassy, Amazon boss, attributed the result to the reorganization of the distribution chain, which reduced costs and delivered “faster than ever”.
But, he insisted during a conference call, “customers want faster deliveries. Our data shows that they buy much more often (when the delivery date is closer).”
The company’s stock was up more than 9% in electronic trading after the Wall Street Stock Exchange closed.
The leader’s comments, however, angered the Athena Coalition, which brings together anti-Amazon organizations.
“Amazon’s ambitions for speed and expansion of its logistics empire are alarming given the serious safety concerns for workers,” the association raged in a statement, citing various complaints and investigations. course against the Seattle company.
Analysts, on the other hand, have been waiting for announcements on so-called generative artificial intelligence (AI), which has been at the center of all discussions in Silicon Valley since the phenomenal launch of ChatGPT at the end of last year.
Microsoft is leading the race with its long-standing investments in OpenAI (ChatGPT), but all of its rivals have moved to rapidly deploy new AI and generative AI tools, across their cloud platforms, online services, and software. office automation and collaboration.
Andy Jassy assured that Amazon was particularly well placed to reap the benefits of this new technology, thanks to its subsidiary AWS, the world’s number one cloud provider, which combines hosting and data processing.
AWS made $22 billion in revenue (down 12%) in the second quarter, but only $5.4 billion in operating profit, down from a year ago.
“AWS’ ongoing slowdown in growth is a near-term concern,” responded Insider Intelligence’s Andrew Lipsman. He hopes for progress during the current quarter, in particular thanks to opportunities linked to AI.
According to Amazon’s statement, AWS is investing $100 million in a service that “will connect AWS AI and machine learning experts with customers around the world to help them imagine and design and launch new generative AI products and services”.
“There isn’t a team, not a business at Amazon that isn’t working on generative AI applications right now,” Andy Jassy insisted.
After a difficult year 2022, and after having thanked thousands of people this winter, the technology giants have largely rebounded despite an economic context still marked by inflation and high interest rates.
Meta (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp) and Alphabet (Google) delighted Wall Street with revenues and profits above expectations.
The two behemoths of digital advertising can thus invest even more in AI.
In a sign that even Apple can no longer escape it, its boss Tim Cook admitted that this technology was “critical” and that the company had been working on generative AI “for years”, after a question from an analyst during the conference telephone.
The Californian group also published its quarterly results on Thursday, but disappointed the market with a further decline in its turnover (-1.4%), the third in a row, due to declining iPhone sales ( -2.4%).
Its title lost 2%, even if its revenues and its net profit came out above expectations, respectively at nearly 82 and 20 billion dollars, thanks to the performance of its services (App Store, streaming, storage, etc.), to the margins better than those of electronic products.
