Amazon Says Profits Rose 88% but Cautions Growth May Slow
The New York Times
The company’s cloud computing business showed strong growth, while a forecast for the current quarter disappointed investors.
Amazon saw healthy consumer sales and a pickup in its cloud computing business in its latest quarter, but the company told investors on Thursday to expect slowing growth ahead.
Sales from October through December hit $187.8 billion, up 10 percent from a year earlier. Profit rose 88 percent, to $20 billion. Both were roughly in line with Wall Street expectations.
But the company signaled that 2025 would be off to a weaker start, expecting sales to grow between 5 percent and 9 percent in the current quarter, and that operating profit could potentially be lower than a year ago.
Cloud computing grew 19 percent, to $28.8 billion, in the quarter. The results — seen as a sign that Amazon’s investments in artificial intelligence were paying off — were particularly strong given that the company’s top cloud competitors, Microsoft and Alphabet, recently reported results that underwhelmed investors. In the same quarter of 2023, Amazon’s cloud business grew just 13 percent.
Investors are also focused on Amazon’s cloud computing business because it has become a profit engine for the company. Operating profit for the cloud business was $10.6 billion, which accounted for half of Amazon’s overall operating profit.
The tech industry has been shaken by the recent release of an efficient artificial intelligence system by a Chinese start-up, DeepSeek. Amazon quickly made DeepSeek's system available for customers to use, saying it is an example of how Amazon has built its approach to let users easily mix and match different A.I. tools.
