In the first quarter of 2021, Amazon’s profit has more than tripled, as the pandemic continues to bring in more online sales.
On Thursday it was reported that Amazon brought in an amazing $8.1 billion are quarterly net income, up 224% from the same time this past year. This crushed the Wall Street analysts’ prediction of $4.98 billion by quite a bit.
Total net sales from this quarter grew 44% from a year ago to $108.5 billion; this also beats the analysts predicted $104.5 billion. Amazon shares (AMZN) also spiked as much as 4% in after-hours trading.
James Harris (global chief strategy officer at Mindshare Worldwide) was quoted saying, “Amazon has the almost perfect business for the world right now… The world’s leading e-commerce platform, a growing cloud business, and a smaller but growing advertising capability all working in unison.”
Amazon’s cloud unit and their biggest moneymaker (Amazon Web Services), posted net sales of $13.5 billion during the quarter, up 32% year-over-year. This is an acceleration in growth from the prior quarters’ as more companies adopt the technology to manage hybrid workforces.
Along with great profit this quarter, Amazon now has more than 200 million Prime users and streaming hours on Prime Video, now up more than 70% year-over-year.
The day before the announcement of the hearing report, Amazon put out that they will be spending $1 billion to raise wages for over 500,000 workers by as much as $3 an hour, as it continues its hiring push. Although this is the case, the company will not be raising its $15 an hour minimum wage.
“This is so crazy, first a 200% quarterly increase and now over 500,000 workers getting a huge raise of three dollars an hour,” says sophomore Teeghan Mcgann.
