Amazon Posts Big Q4 Earnings Beat, Weak Q1 Sales Guidance

Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) shares were volatile after reporting a fourth-quarter earnings and sales beat.

The e-commerce giant delivered earnings of $6.04, beating estimates by 45 cents. Sales came in at $72.4 billion, beating estimates by $580 million.

Amazon sees first-quarter operating income of $2.3 billion-$3.3 billion, but delivered weak first-quarter sales guidance of $56 billion-$60 billion versus the $60.96 billion estimate.

See Also: How Amazon's Stock Trades Following Q4 Earnings

“Alexa was very busy during her holiday season. Echo Dot was the best-selling item across all products on Amazon globally, and customers purchased millions more devices from the Echo family compared to last year,” said Jeff Bezos, Amazon founder and CEO.

“The number of research scientists working on Alexa has more than doubled in the past year, and the results of the team’s hard work are clear. In 2018, we improved Alexa’s ability to understand requests and answer questions by more than 20% through advances in machine learning, we added billions of facts making Alexa more knowledgeable than ever, developers doubled the number of Alexa skills to over 80,000, and customers spoke to Alexa tens of billions more times in 2018 compared to 2017.”

Other Highlights

• Net sales increased 20 percent year-over-year
• Operating income increased to $3.8 billion, up from $2.1 billion year-over-year
• Net Income increased to $3 billion, up from $1.9 billion year-over-year

Shares of Amazon were moving back and forth in after-hours trading. The stock closed Thursday at $1,718.73, up 2.8 percent.

Photo credit: Álvaro Ibáñez from Madrid, Spain, via Wikimedia Commons