by Marco Valsania
Profit boom beyond all expectations for Amazon, thanks above all to an unexpected strength in the retail business. In the second quarter of the year, the revenues of the king of e-commerce and cloud services rose 11% to 134.4 billion dollars, more than 131.5 billion forecast by analysts and represented a one-step return double-digit percentage growth. But it was the net profit that surprised the most: it came to 6.7 billion, equal to 65 cents per share and almost double the 35 cents assumed. A year ago Amazon, led by CEO Andy Jassy, had suffered a loss of two billion. After the market, the stock gained almost 9% and is up by more than 50% since the beginning of 2023.
Amazon expects third-quarter revenue to beat analyst expectations, boosted by the big Prime Day sales event in July. The company expects net sales for the current quarter to be between $138 billion and $143 billion. Analysts polled by Refinitiv were expecting revenue of $138.25 billion so far. Discounts on goods and first-ever promo codes on services like hotel reservations drove US online sales 6.1 percent to a record $12.7 billion during Prime Day in July.
In the quarter just ended, in turn, e-commerce activities acted as a surprising driving force, while the march of Amazon Web Services in the cloud slowed down, with revenues rising by 12% to 22.1 billion, the smallest increase since 2015. AWS however, it still accounted for 70% of operating profits from $7.7 billion. The trend in advertising revenues is also significant, where Amazon is pressing on the digital leaders Alphabet and Facebook: revenues jumped by 22% in the past quarter, significantly more than revealed, to 10.7 billion.
Amazon, like the other Big Techs, is also committed to increasingly exploring the frontier of artificial intelligence and optimizing costs within the group.