Amazon is convincing across the board – NASDAQ value Amazon shares are still in the red before the market

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Despite high inflation and concerns about the economy, the world’s largest online mail order company, Amazon, started the new financial year with a surprisingly significant increase in sales. In the first quarter, revenues grew by nine percent year-on-year to $127.4 billion, as Amazon announced on Thursday after the US stock market closed. Operating profit increased by around 30 percent to $4.8 billion. Amazon is cutting about 27,000 jobs.

The lucrative cloud business around the Amazon Web Services platform, which offers companies applications and storage space on the Internet, increased revenue by 16 percent to $21.4 billion. Analysts had expected a little less. The Group’s business targets for the current second quarter also exceeded market expectations. Amazon assumes group sales of between 127 billion and 133 billion dollars. According to the company, operating profit should be between $2.0 billion and $5.5 billion.

However, the telephone conference on the quarterly figures brought investors the unpleasant realization that there was only weakened growth in the cloud business in April. The share then gave up its initial price gains of more than ten percent in after-hours trading and slipped around two percent into the red.

The first quarter was marked by major job cuts at Amazon. In March, the Internet giant announced that it would lay off a further 9,000 employees. At the beginning of the year, the group had already cut 18,000 of its more than 1.54 million jobs at the time. The wave of layoffs is intended to reduce costs, but initially cost money. According to CFO Brian Olsavsky, there were already around $470 million in severance costs in the past quarter.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy is moving forward in his efforts to reduce costs after spending offensive amid the pandemic online ordering boom. Operating expenses increased in the first quarter by just under nine percent – the lowest increase in at least ten years. The North American business made an operating profit of almost 900 million dollars and was in the black for the first time since 2021. A year ago, an operating loss of 1.6 billion dollars was incurred here./hbr/DP/zb

Amazon shares were up 11.67 percent in after-hours trading on the US NASDAQ stock exchange in an initial reaction, but then the share slipped and lost 1.63 percent to $ 108.03 before trading on Friday.

Editorial office finanzen.ch and dpa (AFX)

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