Amazon Shares Skyrocket as Company Smashes in Earnings Report

E-commerce giant Amazon reported fourth quarter results on Thursday that beat analysts’ expectations, helping the stock
surge as much as 11% in after-hours trading.

The company’s market cap also went above $1 trillion on the report as profits rebounded during the quarter and revenue jumped 21% year over year.

Amazon reported earnings of $6.47 per share while $4.03 was expected by analysts per Refinitiv. Revenue was $87.44 billion compared to expectations of $86.02 billion, per Refinitiv.

Amazon Web Services was $9.95 billion compared to the $9.81 billion expected, according to FactSet.

Looking ahead, Amazon said it now expects to report revenue between $69 billion and $73 billion for the first quarter.

Amazon CFO Brian Olsavsky told CNBC’s Josh Lipton that the company doesn’t “have any visibility” on whether the coronavirus will impact its first quarter results.

Olsavsky said on the earnings call, “We grew from a $30 billion revenue run rate at the end of 2018 to $40 billion revenue run rate at the end of 2019. So we continue to be happy with our top-line growth. The — in dollar terms as opposed to percentages. We had a larger dollar increase in revenue, both year-over-year and quarter-over-quarter. So, we’re very happy with the progress of the revenue and our adoption and acceptance by customers. As far as competitive — competitive set is concerned, we — again, we think that we have start with a very big lead in this space, because of our many years of investment, not only in capacity, but also in services and features that we provide to customers, we learn from customers, we’ve set a great re:Invent Conference in December, where all of our — it is a great aggregation of partners and customers and developers.”

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said “more people joined Prime this quarter than ever before” and that the company now counts more than 150 million paid Prime members around the world.

Bezos owns more than 57 million shares of the company and with the gains on Thursday, the value of his stake rose by roughly $12.6 billion.

Disclaimer: We have no position in Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) and have not been compensated for this article.