The world‘s largest online retailer, Amazon, grew significantly in the past quarter. Sales rose 11 percent year-on-year to $134.4 billion (122.8 billion euros), as Amazon announced on Thursday after the US stock market closed.
Operating profit jumped from $3.3 billion to $7.7 billion. And the bottom line was a profit of $6.7 billion after a loss of $2 billion a year earlier. Amazon’s results exceeded analysts’ expectations. The stock gained a good 6 percent in after-hours trading.
The lucrative cloud business around the Amazon Web Services platform increased revenue by twelve percent to $22.1 billion. AWS offers large and small companies computing power and storage services on the network.
The forecasts for the current third quarter also exceeded market expectations. Amazon assumes group sales of between 138 and 143 billion dollars.
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Meanwhile, Apple ended its third straight quarter of revenue decline. Revenue fell 1.4 percent year-on-year to $81.8 billion. The main triggers were declines in business with iPhones and iPad tablets. Bottom line, profit rose to about $19.9 billion from $19.44 billion a year earlier.
The iPhone, by far the company’s most important product, saw sales in Apple’s third quarter fall 2.4 percent to $39.67 billion. On average, analysts had expected slightly higher revenues of $39.9 billion. The stock fell by around 1 percent in after-hours trading on Thursday.
Industry-wide smartphone sales fell by eight percent according to calculations by the analysis company IDC and Apple held its market share. At the beginning of the year, iPhone sales were still being driven by pent-up demand. In the Christmas quarter, corona lockdowns in Chinese factories caused bottlenecks for the more expensive and lucrative iPhone 14 Pro.
Mac computer sales fell from $7.4 billion to $6.8 billion. Computer sales are currently weakening after the boom at the beginning of the corona pandemic. iPad sales fell from $7.2 billion to $5.8 billion. The services business, which includes revenue from the App Store and services such as Apple Music, reached a record $21.2 billion.