Amazon.com reported fourth quarter results

DBT Bureau

Pune, 9 Feb 2025

Amazon.com, Inc. reported financial results for its fourth quarter ended December 31, 2024.

Fourth Quarter 2024

• Net sales increased 10% to $187.8 billion in the fourth quarter, compared with $170.0 billion in fourth quarter 2023. Excluding the $0.9 billion unfavorable impact from year-over-year changes in foreign exchange rates throughout the quarter, net sales increased 11% compared with fourth quarter 2023.
  • North America segment sales increased 10% year-over-year to $115.6 billion.
  • International segment sales increased 8% year-over-year to $43.4 billion, or increased 9% excluding changes in foreign exchange rates.
  • AWS segment sales increased 19% year-over-year to $28.8 billion.
• Operating income increased to $21.2 billion in the fourth quarter, compared with $13.2 billion in fourth quarter 2023.
  • North America segment operating income was $9.3 billion, compared with operating income of $6.5 billion in fourth quarter 2023.
  • International segment operating income was $1.3 billion, compared with an operating loss of $0.4 billion in fourth quarter 2023.
  • AWS segment operating income was $10.6 billion, compared with operating income of $7.2 billion in fourth quarter 2023.
• Net income increased to $20.0 billion in the fourth quarter, or $1.86 per diluted share, compared with $10.6 billion, or $1.00 per diluted share, in fourth quarter 2023.

Full Year 2024

• Net sales increased 11% to $638.0 billion in 2024, compared with $574.8 billion in 2023. Excluding the $2.3 billion unfavorable impact from year-over-year changes in foreign exchange rates throughout the year, net sales increased 11% compared with 2023.
  • North America segment sales increased 10% year-over-year to $387.5 billion.
  • International segment sales increased 9% year-over-year to $142.9 billion, or increased 10% excluding changes in foreign exchange rates.
  • AWS segment sales increased 19% year-over-year to $107.6 billion.
• Operating income increased to $68.6 billion in 2024, compared with $36.9 billion in 2023.
  • North America segment operating income was $25.0 billion, compared with operating income of $14.9 billion in 2023.
  • International segment operating income was $3.8 billion, compared with an operating loss of $2.7 billion in 2023.
  • AWS segment operating income was $39.8 billion, compared with operating income of $24.6 billion in 2023.
• Net income increased to $59.2 billion in 2024, or $5.53 per diluted share, compared with $30.4 billion, or $2.90 per diluted share, in 2023.
• Operating cash flow increased 36% to $115.9 billion for the trailing twelve months, compared with $84.9 billion for the trailing twelve months ended December 31, 2023.
• Free cash flow increased to $38.2 billion for the trailing twelve months, compared with $36.8 billion for the trailing twelve months ended December 31, 2023.
• Free cash flow less principal repayments of finance leases and financing obligations increased to $35.5 billion for the trailing twelve months, compared with $32.2 billion for the trailing twelve months ended December 31, 2023.
• Free cash flow less equipment finance leases and principal repayments of all other finance leases and financing obligations increased to $36.2 billion for the trailing twelve months, compared with $35.5 billion for the trailing twelve months ended December 31, 2023.

“The holiday shopping season was the most successful yet for Amazon and we appreciate the support of our customers, selling partners, and employees who helped make it so,” said Andy Jassy, President and CEO, Amazon. “When we look back on this quarter several years from now, I suspect what we’ll most remember is the remarkable innovation delivered across all of our businesses, none more so than in AWS where we introduced our new Trainium2 AI chip, our own foundation models in Amazon Nova, a plethora of new models and features in Amazon Bedrock that give customers flexibility and cost savings, liberating transformations in Amazon Q to migrate from old platforms, and the next edition of Amazon SageMaker to pull data, analytics, and AI together more concertedly. These benefits are often realized by customers (and the business) several months down the road, but these are substantial enablers in this emerging technology environment and we’re excited to see what customers build.”

Some other highlights since the company’s last earnings announcement include that Amazon:

• Delivered at its fastest speeds ever for Prime members in 2024.
• Delivered over 65% more items to U.S. Prime members the same day or overnight than in Q4 2023.
• Held a record-breaking Black Friday Week and Cyber Monday deal event that was also the largest ever for independent sellers in Amazon’s store.
• Was named lowest-priced U.S. retailer by Profitero for the eighth year in a row. The study found Amazon’s online prices were an average of 14% less than other major U.S. retailers.
• Launched Amazon Haul, a new shopping experience in Amazon’s U.S. shopping app and mobile site, with ultra-low prices.
• Drew 50 million worldwide viewers to Red One in its first four days, making it Amazon MGM Studios’ most-watched film debut ever on Prime Video.
• Finished third season of Thursday Night Football on Prime Video with a full-season average of 13.2 million viewers according to Nielsen—an 11% increase over 2023—and a peak of 24.7 million during the Wild Card playoff game between the Steelers and Ravens.
• Had the biggest Q4 for Kindle device sales in over a decade, with a new lineup of Kindles driving a 30% year-over-year increase in devices sold.
• Held 13th AWS re:Invent, with 55,000+ in-person attendees and 1.8 million livestream viewers.
• Announced a plethora of new AWS capabilities, including:
  • Amazon Nova: Amazon’s own family of foundation models that compare favorably in intelligence against the leading models in the world, but offer lower latency, lower price, and integration with key Bedrock features like fine-tuning, model distillation, knowledge bases, and agentic capabilities. Thousands of customers are already using Nova, including Deloitte, SAP, Robinhood, Palantir Technologies, Dentsu Digital, AppFolio, Fortinet, Trellix, 123RF, Envato, Pattern, and Ativion.
  • General Availability of Trainium2: EC2 Trn2 instances, powered by Trainium2 AI chips, offer 30-40% better price-performance than current generations of GPU-based instances.
  • Trainium2 UltraServers: A new type of EC2 Trn2 offering using ultra-fast networking to connect four Trn2 servers into an extra large server, enabling even faster training and inference on AWS.
  • Project Rainier: A collaboration with Anthropic using hundreds of thousands of Trainium2 chips to build the world’s largest AI compute cluster.
  • New leading foundation models in Amazon Bedrock from DeepSeek, Luma AI, and poolside.
  • Amazon Bedrock Marketplace, where customers can choose from over 100 popular models.
  • New features for Amazon Bedrock, including Prompt Caching, Intelligent Prompt Routing, and Model Distillation, all of which help customers achieve lower cost and latency in their inference.
  • New Amazon SageMaker AI features, including the ability to manage costs and prioritize which workloads should receive capacity when budgets are reached.
  • New Amazon Q Transformations that make it easy to move from Windows .NET applications to Linux, VMware to EC2, and accelerates mainframe migrations from multi-year to multi-quarter efforts.
  • Amazon Aurora DSQL: The fastest distributed database with 99.999% multi-Region availability, virtually unlimited scalability, strong consistency, zero infrastructure management, PostgreSQL compatibility, and 4x faster reads and writes vs. other popular distributed SQL databases.
  • S3 Tables, making S3 the first cloud object store with fully-managed support for Apache Iceberg.
  • S3 Metadata, automatically generating queryable metadata, simplifying data discovery, business analytics, and real-time inference to help customers unlock the value of their data in S3.
  • The next generation of Amazon SageMaker, which brings together all of the data, analytics services and AI services into one interface to do analytics and AI more easily at scale.
• Signed new AWS agreements with the U.S. Army, Intuit, PayPal, Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings Ltd., Northrop Grumman, Medtronic, The Guardian Life Insurance Company of America, Reddit, Japan Airlines, Baker Hughes, The Hertz Corporation, Redfin, Chime, and Asana.
• Announced GROW with SAP on AWS to help customers rapidly deploy SAP’s enterprise resource planning.
• Launched AWS Asia Pacific (Thailand) and AWS Mexico (Central) Regions.
• Supported California wildfire relief efforts with over 500,000 essential items delivered through Disaster Relief by Amazon, AWS cloud technology to help emergency responders, and $10 million in donations.
• Supported communities hit by flooding in southern Spain by donating and delivering more than 265,000 essential items.
• Ranked No. 3 on Fortune magazine’s World’s Most Admired Companies list.
• Won awards for advancement in workplace health and safety from Brandon Hall Group, the Network of Employers for Traffic Safety, and Verdantix.
• Was named the world’s largest corporate purchaser of renewable energy by Bloomberg NEF for the fifth straight year, with more than 600 wind and solar projects globally.

First Quarter 2025 Guidance

• Net sales are expected to be between $151.0 billion and $155.5 billion, or to grow between 5% and 9% compared with first quarter 2024. This guidance anticipates an unusually large, unfavorable impact of approximately $2.1 billion, or 150 basis points, from foreign exchange rates. Also, as a reminder, in first quarter 2024 the impact from Leap Year added approximately $1.5 billion in net sales.
• Operating income is expected to be between $14.0 billion and $18.0 billion, compared with $15.3 billion in first quarter 2024.
• This guidance assumes, among other things, that no additional business acquisitions, restructurings, or legal settlements are concluded.