Amazon’s Q3 earnings beat estimates with 37% sales growth

Amazon has reported its earnings for the third quarter of the financial year, beating already positive estimations.

Some of the key highlights include sales of $96.1bn in the quarter - up 37% compared to the same period in 2019. Profits reached a record high of $6.3bn, almost three times as high compared to last year.

The standout success of Amazon’s vast empire was its original ecommerce unit, driven by the uptake of online shopping forced by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. That was closely followed by its cloud computing division Amazon Web Services.

In a press release, Amazon’s founder and CEO Jeff Bezos said: “We’re proud to have created over 400,000 jobs this year alone. We’re seeing more customers than ever shopping early for their holiday gifts, which is just one of the signs that this is going to be an unprecedented holiday season. Big thank you to our employees and selling partners around the world who’ve been busy getting ready to deliver for customers this holiday.”

It’s been a bumper quarter for tech companies all round, with the likes of Facebook, Apple and Google all reporting considerable growth. The digital nature of their businesses has allowed them to not only weather but to gain from the pandemic, which has had a devastating impact on brick-and-mortar stores and other physical amenities.

In an earnings call, Amazon’s Chief Financial Officer Brian Olsavsky said: “Our Q3 results largely reflect a continuation of demand trends we saw when we exited the second quarter. The strong demand in sales growth across our major product categories globally including hardlines, consumables, softlines and media. We also continue to see strong Prime member engagement. Prime members continue to shop with greater frequency and across more categories than before the pandemic began. They continue to expand their usage of Prime's digital benefits including Prime video.”

The company was not unaffected by COVID-19, however, with Orlavsky saying related expenses in Q3 totalled $2.5bn, with $4bn anticipated in Q4.

(Image: Amazon)