Amazon enjoys best ever year with record profits and sales

Amazon said its profit included a $789 million benefit as a result of the new US tax law.

The retailer announced plans Tuesday to enter the healthcare market in a joint venture with financial institutions Berkshire Hathaway and J.P. Morgan Chase.

A new feature has been added introduced by Amazon to its Alexa virtual assistant software, making it able to send and receive text messages on several Android devices.

However, Bezos did say that Amazon sold “tens of millions” of Echo devices in 2017.

“Our 2017 projections for Alexa were very optimistic”, the Amazon CEO said in the company’s fourth-quarter earnings release on Thursday.

Amazon founder and chief executive Jeff Bezos said the rise of of the company’s Alexa products was a key factor in the company’s continued growth.

Looking ahead to the first quarter, Amazon expects to see operating income in the range of $300 million to $1.0 billion and net sales in the range of $47.75 billion to $50.75 billion. That blew past the $1.88 per share analysts expected, according to FactSet.

Net income was $3bn, compared with $2.4bn in 2016.

Amazon reported better-than-expected results for the fourth quarter, with net sales up 38 percent to United States dollars 60.5 billion.

Shoppers threw their money at the e-commerce giant, giving the company its strongest fourth-quarter sales growth in eight years and its most-profitable quarter ever.

Amazon shipped more than five billion packages globally in 2017, as it had more paid users join compared to the previous year. It also started selling Echos and Kindle tablets near the grocer’s produce. “And there is Whole Foods, where some progress has been made – but which has yet to feel the full force of Amazon’s innovative approach”. It was the company’s 11th straight quarter of positive net income and the largest in its history.

Lucrative Prime memberships continue to increase.

One of the big ways Amazon boosted its turnover a year ago was by flogging Amazon Echo speakers, which let users find out about things like the news or weather simply by using their voice. The company had 566,000 employees at the end of 2017, up 66 percent from the year before.

The GBH Insights analyst also said that AI will “play a vital role in Amazon services over the coming years”.

Meanwhile, Bezos is on the hunt for a second headquarters that will complement its existing Seattle base.

Amazon’s cloud unit, AWS, kept on being the quickest developing and most productive business of the organization.

Amazon’s subsidiary, Amazon Web Services reported $5.11 billion in revenue, beating analysts’ estimates of $4.97 billion, and increasing 45 percent year over year. More significantly. Euromonitor expects about half of India’s population to be online by 2021, up from around 30 per cent in 2016-with a majority hailing from rural areas and smaller towns-by which time the Internet retailing market size is likely to balloon to around Rs 4,000 billion.