| Company | Value | Change | %Change |
|---|
Here’s how the numbers looked like:
- Revenue: $187.79 billion, higher than expectations of $187.3 billion
- Earnings Per Share: $1.86, higher than expectations of $1.49
- Amazon Web Service Revenue: $28.8 billion, in-line with expectations
Amazon expects sales for the first quarter of 2025 to range between $151 billion to $155.5 billion, which is well below analyst expectations of $158.5 billion. The guidance factors in forex headwinds worth $2.1 billion or as much as 1.5%.
Based on the forecast, the company’s growth is likely to be between 5% to 9%, which, at the lower end of the range, would be the slowest on record. Amazon became a public company in 1997.
Chief Executive Officer Andy Jassy has been cutting costs and focusing the company on three business pillars: e-commerce, cloud computing and advertising. Determined to become a supermarket for artificial intelligence products and services, he’s ploughing billions of dollars into data centers and homegrown chips capable of handling AI tasks and taking on market leader Nvidia Corp.“AWS growth did not accelerate as anticipated and instead matched Q3 levels, indicating that the company is challenged by the same types of capacity constraints facing rivals Google and Microsoft,” said Sky Canaves, an analyst at Emarketer.
Amazon purchases of property and equipment totaled about $83 billion in 2024, with much of that spending on the AI race. The company spent $27.8 billion on property and equipment in the fourth quarter, well above analysts’ expectations of $22.3 billion in such expenses.
Amazon CFO Brian Olsavsky said the company expects to boost capital expenditures to $100 billion in 2025, up from last year’s spending of roughly $83 billion.
Amazon shares fell 4% in extended trading post the earnings announcement and management commentary.
(With Inputs From Agencies.)
