Amazon has announced its financial results for Q4 ending December 31, 2017. Year-on-year (YoY) it saw a sales increase of 38% to $60.5 billion compared to $43.7 billion in 2016 during the same period. When it excluded the $1.1 billion favourable impact from YoY changes in foreign exchange rates, net sales had increased by 36% compared with Q4 2016.
Amazon founder and CEO, Jezz Bezos said:
“Our 2017 projections for Alexa were very optimistic, and we far exceeded them. We don’t see positive surprises of this magnitude very often - expect us to double down. We’ve reached an important point where other companies and developers are accelerating adoption of Alexa. There are now over 30,000 skills from outside developers, customers can control more than 4,000 smart home devices from 1,200 unique brands with Alexa, and we’re seeing strong response to our new far-field voice kit for manufacturers. Much more to come and a huge thank you to our customers and partners.”
Going forward, the company expects net sales in the first quarter to be between $47.57 billion and $50.75 billion, or to grow between 34% and 42% compared with Q1 2017 - this estimation anticipates a favourable impact of around $1.2 billion from foreign exchange rates. The company also expects its operating income to be between $300 million and $1 billion compared to $1 billion in Q1 2017.
Frankly, the figures that Amazon released are not surprising. The company revealed that it gained four million new users on its premium tier subscription, Amazon Prime; and that Amazon devices such as the Echo Dot and the Fire TV Stick had their best holiday period yet.
Source: Amazon