Riding on surging online sales during the pandemic as people stayed home, Amazon reported solid second quarter results, registering a 40 percent increase in net sales to US$ 88.9 billion, compared with US$ 63.4 billion in the same period last year.
Net income increased to US$ 5.2 billion in the second quarter, compared with net income of US$ 2.6 billion in second quarter 2019, the company said in a statement on Thursday.
Amazon shares rose 5 percent in the after-hours trade.
“This was another highly unusual quarter, and I couldn’t be more proud of and grateful to our employees around the globe,” said Jeff Bezos, Founder and CEO, Amazon.
“As expected, we spent over US$ 4 billion on incremental COVID-19-related costs in the quarter to help keep employees safe and deliver products to customers in this time of high demand,” he added.
Bezos said the company has created over 175,000 new jobs since March and are in the process of bringing 125,000 of these employees into regular, full-time positions.
“Third-party sales again grew faster this quarter than Amazon’s first-party sales. Even in this unpredictable time, we injected significant money into the economy this quarter, investing over $9 billion in capital projects, including fulfillment, transportation, and AWS,” Bezos informed.
The cloud computing arm Amazon Web Services (AWS) reported revenues of US$ 10.81 billion for the quarter, up 29 percent year over year,
“Customers are using AWS to lessen the impact of the COVID-19 crisis on families, communities, and businesses,” said the company.
For its third quarter, Amazon said it expects net sales to be between US$ 87 billion and US$ 93 billion, or to grow between 24 percent and 33 percent compared with third quarter 2019.
“Operating income is expected to be between US$ 2.0 billion and US$ 5.0 billion, compared with US$ 3.2 billion in third quarter 2019. This guidance assumes more than US$ 2.0 billion of costs related to COVID-19,” said the company.
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