Amazon continues to grow at record rates. Last quarter, both sales and earnings came in well above expectations.
Services grow like cabbage
In the first three months of the year, the e-commerce giant posted sales of 108.5 billion dollars (89.6 billion euros), a growth of no less than 44%, and 4 billion dollars more than expected. The net profit was 8.1 billion dollars (6.6 billion euros), also well above analyst expectations.
In recent years, services have become increasingly important for Amazon and this trend continued in the last quarter. Jeff Bezos’ company now derives more than 47% of its turnover from all kinds of services. The cloud service branch AWS alone accounted for revenues of 13.5 billion dollars (11.2 billion euros) in the past quarter, an annual growth of 32%. The video and streaming service Prime Video also did very well. Incidentally, Amazon Prime, the paying subscription service of the American company, now has more than 200 million members worldwide.
Pay rise
In the margin of the quarterly figures, Amazon also announced a wage increase for the staff of the American distribution centres. More than half a million employees will see their hourly wages increase by between 0.5 and 3 dollars. Recently, Bezos stated that he would pay more attention to the welfare of employees in the future. For years, the web giant has been criticised for the workload and working conditions in the fulfilment centres.
For the second quarter, Amazon expects a growth between 24 and 30%. Sales are expected to be between 110 and 116 billion dollars (91-96 billion euros).
