Amazon is pleased with its handling of the redundancies, as profits have soared. In the second quarter, the online retail giant posted an operating profit of $7.7 billion, compared with $3.3 billion last year. This is its third-best performance ever, after the record profits generated in early 2021.
It would be reductive to think that the surge in profits was due solely to redundancies, but there is also a clear improvement in the financial balance sheet of e-commerce activities. In the second quarter of 2022, these posted an operating loss of $2.4 billion, weighed down in particular by the downturn in international sales. This year, they generated an operating profit of 2.3 billion.
Inflation affected Amazon’s online sales, which were down in 2022. The rebound in 2023 also saw a jump in revenues from the logistics offer (FBA), which Amazon offers to third-party sellers on its marketplace. And advertising revenues continue to grow, surpassing the symbolic $10 billion mark for the first time.
The good news comes from Amazon Web Services (AWS), the company’s cloud computing offering, which remains the group’s leading source of profits, but is suffering a further decline in growth, limited to 12% for the quarter. The cloud specialist continues to be penalized by the reluctance of companies to limit their IT spending. And it has yet to benefit fully from the euphoria surrounding generative artificial intelligence, which has boosted revenues for its two main rivals, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.
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