Amazon reports 37% growth in sales, expects bumper holiday season

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SME Times News Bureau | 30 Oct, 2020
Ecommerce behemoth Amazon has reported better-than-expected Q3 results in the pandemic times when people tend to shop more online, as net sales increased 37 per cent to $96.1 billion in the third quarter, compared with $70 billion in the third quarter 2019.

Amazon said that the sales in the fourth quarter will be between $112 billion and $121 billion – a healthy growth from a year earlier.

Net income increased to $6.3 billion in the third quarter, compared with net income of $2.1 billion in third quarter 2019.

"We're seeing more customers than ever shopping early for their holiday gifts, which is just one of the signs that this is going to be an unprecedented holiday season," said Jeff Bezos, Amazon founder and CEO.

"Offering jobs with industry-leading pay and great healthcare, including to entry-level and front-line employees, is even more meaningful in a time like this, and we're proud to have created over 400,000 jobs this year alone," he said in a statement on Thursday.

The company's cloud arm Amazon Web Services (AWS), generated sales of $11.6 billion for the quarter, up 29 per cent. The operating income $3.54 billion for AWS topped estimates of $3.45 billion.

AWS in September quarter announced significant customer momentum with new commitments and migrations, including leading payments technology company Global Payments, to manage issuer processing and handling of their approximately 27 billion transactions processed annually.

Amazon's "other" category, primarily its advertising business, saw revenue rise 51 per cent to $5.4 billion.

Subscription services, including revenue from Prime memberships, jumped 33 per cent to $6.58 billion.

Amazon now has more than 1.12 million full-time employees across the globe, an increase of 50 per cent year over year.