Amazon posts its fifth straight quarter of profits

Earlier this month, the company held the second annual Amazon Prime Day and generated a record-high sales number.

After several years of heavy spending on the business that left it nursing losses, Amazon delivered quarterly profits of $857m, up from $92m a year ago and taking its running total for the past year to $1.9bn.

The company’s cloud computing arm, Amazon Web Services, is largely responsible for Amazon’s pivot to profitability in recent years.

Analysts had been modeling $29.6 billion and $1.11 per share.

Revenues jumped 31 per cent to US$30.4 billion, Amazon said in stronger-than-expected results. Although AWS grew 55% year over year to $2.86 billion, but grew at a rate that was about ten percentage points slower from the first quarter.

Amazon shattered earnings expectations with its second-quarter earnings on Thursday, bringing in far more profit ($1.78 per share) than had been anticipated ($1.11).

The company’s strengths can be seen in multiple areas, such as its impressive record of earnings per share growth, compelling growth in net income, robust revenue growth, expanding profit margins and solid stock price performance.

Amazon also helps power the web, and it makes a lot of money from it.

By segment, North America drew in $17.7 billion in net sales, worldwide accounted for $9.8 billion, and AWS accounted for $2.9 billion. AWS posted $718 million in operating income, accounting for 56 percent of overall operating income. That was an increase of 19 percent quarter over quarter and a whopping 84 percent year over year. This beat the average estimate of $US2.83 billion, according to market research firm FactSet StreetAccount.

“It’s been a busy few months for Amazon around the world, and particularly in India”, said the CEO, Jeff Bezos, in a statement.