Amazon Earnings Top Estimates but the Cloud Business Is Just OK
3 min
Amazon shares gained ground in late trading Thursday after the company posted better-than-expected financial results for the September quarter.
Amazon (ticker: AMZN) said third-quarter sales were $143.1 billion, up 13% from a year ago, accelerating from 11% growth in the June quarter, and above the high end of the company’s guidance range.
Profits were 94 cents a share, well above the consensus of 58 cents. Net income of $9.9 billion included a $1.1 billion pretax noncash gain on the company’s stake in Rivian Automotive (RIVN).
Amazon Web Services revenue was $23.1 billion, up 12.3% from a year ago, which was about in line with Wall Street estimates, and consistent with the 12.2% increase one quarter earlier.
Amazon CFO Brian Olsavsky said in a call with reporters that the company increased AWS revenue by about $900 million versus three months earlier. He also noted that customers continue to focus on spending optimisation, but that the process is slowing down. He declined to say whether the growth rate for AWS has now bottomed.
Amazon shares were trading around breakeven heading into the company’s conference call late Thursday, but they moved higher after CEO Andy Jassy said on the call that AWS booked some large contracts late in the third quarter. They won’t start showing up in results until the fourth quarter, he said.
The stock was up 4.6% in late trading as of 6:15 p.m.
Heading into the earnings report, AWS growth had decelerated for six straight quarters, falling to 12.2% in the June quarter, from 39.5% in the last quarter of 2021. The slowing growth reflects a recent focus from cloud customers on “optimising” their cloud spending, figuring out how to get more value from their growing cloud outlays.
This week’s results from cloud rivals Alphabet (GOOGL) and Microsoft (MSFT) both noted that the optimization trend is continuing. The Google Cloud business posted disappointing results in the quarter, while Microsoft topped expectations. Amazon largely split the difference. Amazon bulls have expected AWS growth to begin accelerating soon as corporate spending budgets loosen and a focus on AI workloads expands, but there was no big jump in the latest quarter.
Operating income was $11.2 billion, well above the company’s forecast range of $5.5 billion to $8.5 billion. That incudes an operating profit in North America of $4.3 billion, reversing a loss of $400 million in the year ago quarter. AWS had an operating profit of $7 billion, up from $5.4 billion in the year-earlier period.
“We had a strong third quarter as our cost to serve and speed of delivery in our stores business took another step forward, our AWS growth continued to stabilise, our advertising revenue grew robustly, and overall operating income and free cash flow rose significantly,” Amazon CEO Andy Jassy in a press release.
Shares of Amazon were up 3.4% in late trading following the report.
Online store sales were $57.3 billion, up 7%, improving from 4% growth in the June quarter, while third-party services revenue was $343 billion, up 20%, versus 18% growth in the June quarter.
Amazon said subscription services revenue—mostly Amazon Prime—was $10.2 billion, up 14%. Sales at physical stores were $5 billion, up 6%.
Advertising revenue jumped 26% in the quarter, from 22% in the June quarter, to $12.1 billion. Olsavsky said the company isn’t seeing an impact from geopolitics. That’s a contrast from Meta, which noted on its earnings call Wednesday that the company was seeing some slowdown in spending tied to the outbreak of violence in the Middle East.
Olsavsky noted that ad growth has outpaced overall company growth, driven by improved targeting and higher click-through rates.
For the fourth quarter, Amazon sees sales of between $160 billion and $167 billion, with operating income ranging from $7 billion to $11 billion. Wall Street estimates for the quarter have called for revenue of $167.2 billion, up 12%, with operating income of $8.7 billion.
Amazon shares were down 1.5% in Thursday’s regular session.
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Continued stagflation and cost of living pressures are causing couples to think twice about starting a family, new data has revealed, with long term impacts expected
2 min
Australia is in the midst of a ‘baby recession’ with preliminary estimates showing the number of births in 2023 fell by more than four percent to the lowest level since 2006, according to KPMG. The consultancy firm says this reflects the impact of cost-of-living pressures on the feasibility of younger Australians starting a family.
KPMG estimates that 289,100 babies were born in 2023. This compares to 300,684 babies in 2022 and 309,996 in 2021, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS). KPMG urban economist Terry Rawnsley said weak economic growth often leads to a reduced number of births. In 2023, ABS data shows gross domestic product (GDP) fell to 1.5 percent. Despite the population growing by 2.5 percent in 2023, GDP on a per capita basis went into negative territory, down one percent over the 12 months.
“Birth rates provide insight into long-term population growth as well as the current confidence of Australian families,” said Mr Rawnsley. “We haven’t seen such a sharp drop in births in Australia since the period of economic stagflation in the 1970s, which coincided with the initial widespread adoption of the contraceptive pill.”
Mr Rawnsley said many Australian couples delayed starting a family while the pandemic played out in 2020. The number of births fell from 305,832 in 2019 to 294,369 in 2020. Then in 2021, strong employment and vast amounts of stimulus money, along with high household savings due to lockdowns, gave couples better financial means to have a baby. This led to a rebound in births.
However, the re-opening of the global economy in 2022 led to soaring inflation. By the start of 2023, the Australian consumer price index (CPI) had risen to its highest level since 1990 at 7.8 percent per annum. By that stage, the Reserve Bank had already commenced an aggressive rate-hiking strategy to fight inflation and had raised the cash rate every month between May and December 2022.
Five more rate hikes during 2023 put further pressure on couples with mortgages and put the brakes on family formation. “This combination of the pandemic and rapid economic changes explains the spike and subsequent sharp decline in birth rates we have observed over the past four years,” Mr Rawnsley said.
The impact of high costs of living on couples’ decision to have a baby is highlighted in births data for the capital cities. KPMG estimates there were 60,860 births in Sydney in 2023, down 8.6 percent from 2019. There were 56,270 births in Melbourne, down 7.3 percent. In Perth, there were 25,020 births, down 6 percent, while in Brisbane there were 30,250 births, down 4.3 percent. Canberra was the only capital city where there was no fall in the number of births in 2023 compared to 2019.
“CPI growth in Canberra has been slightly subdued compared to that in other major cities, and the economic outlook has remained strong,” Mr Rawnsley said. “This means families have not been hurting as much as those in other capital cities, and in turn, we’ve seen a stabilisation of births in the ACT.”
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