Amazon Earnings Recap: Stock After Revenue, EPS Beats

• Amazon reported third-quarter earnings on Thursday.
• The tech giant beat revenue forecasts and provided strong sales guidance for the fourth quarter.
• Amazon shares rose 6% in volatile after-hours trading.

from Amazon third-quarter earnings beat estimates and provided strong guidance for the current quarter on Thursday, sending shares higher after the closing bell.

Net sales for Q3 came in at $158.9 billion, beating the consensus analyst estimate of $157.3 billion, and Amazon also forecast sales for its current quarter of $181.5 billion to 188, $5 billion, compared to about $186.36 billion. The tech titan also tapped EPS.

Big Tech companies have come under increasing scrutiny recently to demonstrate that the billions of dollars they’ve spent in recent years on AI infrastructure are starting to pay off. During the investor call, CEO Jassy said Amazon plans to spend more than $75 billion in 2025, most of it in its key cloud computing unit AWS.

Jassy said that growth is driven by generative AI and that customers and shareholders will feel good in the long run. AI “is a really unusually large, maybe once-in-a-lifetime type of opportunity,” he said.

On the retail side, Amazon CFO Brian Olsavsky said “Prime remains a major contributor” to this year’s growth. Growth in U.S. and international paid memberships continued to pick up in the third quarter, he said, helped by Prime Day events in July.

While the company didn’t really comment on the state of the U.S. consumer, Olsavsky said Amazon’s “faster delivery speeds” are helping drive growth in purchases of everyday items.

Amazon stock rose as much as 6% in volatile after-hours trading shortly after the results. Despite a steep 3.3% drop during regular trading on Thursday, the stock is still up 23% so far in 2024.