SAN FRANCISCO: Amazon joined the $1-trillion club with Apple, Microsoft and Alphabet after shares climbed nearly 11 per cent in extended trading as the retail giant reported $87.44 billion in sales – 21 per cent increase (Year-on-Year) — for its fourth quarter that ended on December 31, 2019.
Amazon’s Cloud business reported $9.95 billion in sales, up 34 per cent from the year-ago quarter. Net income increased to $3.3 billion in the fourth quarter, or $6.47 per diluted share, compared with net income of $3 billion, or $6.04 per diluted share from fourth quarter in 2018. Jeff Bezos, Amazon founder and CEO said that Prime membership continues to get better for customers year after year.
“And customers are responding as more people joined Prime this quarter than ever before, and we now have over 150 million paid Prime members around the world,” Bezos said in a statement late Thursday.
“Members now have free two-hour grocery delivery from Amazon Fresh and Whole Foods Market in more than 2,000 US cities and towns,” he added. For the full calendar year 2019, the net sales increased 20 per cent to $280.5 billion — compared with $232.9 billion in 2018. Net income increased to $11.6 billion in 2019, compared with net income of $10.1 billion in 2018.
Amazon announced there are now hundreds of millions of Alexa-enabled devices in customers’ hands and customers interact with Alexa billions of times each week. Fire TV now has more than 40 million active users worldwide. Amazon announced the new Fire TV Edition at CES 2020, which includes a set of tools, features, and services that make it even easier for developers, operators, device makers, and manufacturers to integrate Fire TV into their products.
BMW and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles are among the first automakers to introduce Fire TV in their future vehicles. Amazon Music has more than 55 million customers worldwide, said the company.
The company mentioned recent investment announcements during Bezos’ India visit which was marred by Delhi’s political heat amid traders’ ire. “Amazon pledged to invest $1 billion to help digitize traders and micro, small, and medium-sized businesses (MSMBs) across India, with the goal of bringing more than 10 million MSMBs online by 2025,” said the company.
Today, there are more than 550,000 sellers on Amazon India marketplace, more than 60,000 Indian manufacturers and brands are exporting their “Make in India” products to customers worldwide on Amazon.
“We expect our new $1 billion investment to enable $10 billion in cumulative Indian exports by 2025,” it added. Since launching amazon.in in 2013, Amazon has created more than 700,000 direct and indirect jobs in India. In January, Amazon announced plans to create an additional one million jobs in India by 2025, with continued investments in technology, infrastructure, and logistics.
Since 2014, Amazon has grown its employee base more than four times, and last year inaugurated its new campus building in Hyderabad, Amazon’s first fully-owned campus outside the United States and the largest building globally in terms of employees and space.
Amazon India announced it will have 10,000 electric vehicles in its delivery fleet by 2025. In 2019, authors earned more than $300 million from the Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) Select Global Fund, totaling more than $1.1 billion since the launch of Kindle Unlimited, said the company.
Millions of independent authors have self-published millions of books through KDP since launching the service in 2007. Additionally, thousands of independent authors earned more than $50,000, with more than a thousand surpassing $100,000 in royalties in 2019 through KDP.
Independent third-party sellers, mostly small and medium-sized businesses, sold more than a billion items during the holiday season, including more than 100 million items shipped with Prime Free One-Day Delivery.
AWS announced several significant new customer commitments and migrations during the quarter spanning major industries. AWS announced the general availability of AWS Outposts, a fully-managed service that extends AWS infrastructure and services to virtually any data center, co-location space, or on-premises facility.
AWS announced six new capabilities for Amazon SageMaker, a fully-managed service that removes the heavy lifting from each step of the machine learning process. AWS also announced five new artificial intelligence (AI) services designed to put machine learning in the hands of more developers. IANS
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