Amazon.com Announces Second Quarter Sales up 20% to $63.4 Billion

Business Wire

July 26, 2019

Amazon.com Inc. announced financial results for its second quarter ended June 30, 2019.

Operating cash flow increased 65% to $36.0 billion for the trailing twelve months, compared with $21.8 billion for the trailing twelve months ended June 30, 2018. Free cash flow increased to $25.0 billion for the trailing twelve months, compared with $10.4 billion for the trailing twelve months ended June 30, 2018. Free cash flow less principal repayments of finance leases and financing obligations increased to $16.1 billion for the trailing twelve months, compared with $4.1 billion for the trailing twelve months ended June 30, 2018. Free cash flow less equipment finance leases and principal repayments of all other finance leases and financing obligations increased to $13.0 billion for the trailing twelve months, compared with $546 million for the trailing twelve months ended June 30, 2018.

Common shares outstanding plus shares underlying stock-based awards totaled 510 million on June 30, 2019, compared with 506 million one year ago.

Net sales increased 20% to $63.4 billion in the second quarter, compared with $52.9 billion in second quarter 2018. Excluding the $814 million unfavorable impact from year-over-year changes in foreign exchange rates throughout the quarter, net sales increased 21% compared with second quarter 2018.

Marketing Technology News: Will Salesforce Customer 360 Arrival Push CRMs and DMPs Out of Equation in 2020?

Operating income increased to $3.1 billion in the second quarter, compared with operating income of $3.0 billion in second quarter 2018.

Net income increased to $2.6 billion in the second quarter, or $5.22 per diluted share, compared with net income of $2.5 billion, or $5.07 per diluted share, in second quarter 2018.

“Customers are responding to Prime’s move to one-day delivery — we’ve received a lot of positive feedback and seen accelerating sales growth,” said Jeff Bezos, Amazon founder and CEO. “Free one-day delivery is now available to Prime members on more than ten million items, and we’re just getting started. A big thank you to the team for continuing to make life easier for customers.”

Marketing Technology News: Adobe XD Makes Machine-to-Machine Interaction a Reality; Announces Voice Integration with Amazon Alexa

Highlights

Prime Day was once again the largest shopping event in Amazon history with more than one million deals exclusively for Prime members. Over the two days of Prime Day, on July 15 and 16, sales surpassed the previous Black Friday and Cyber Monday combined. Prime Day was also the biggest event ever for Amazon devices, when comparing two-day periods. Amazon welcomed more new Prime members on July 15 than any previous day, and almost as many on July 16 — making these the two biggest days ever for member signups. In addition, Prime members received tens of millions of dollars in savings when shopping from Whole Foods Market and bought more than $2 billion of products from independent small and medium-sized businesses. Millions of people worldwide streamed Prime Day events, including the Prime Day Concert presented by Amazon Music and headlined by 10-time GRAMMY Award-winning artist Taylor Swift.
Amazon hosted thousands of attendees at re:MARS, a new Artificial Intelligence (AI) conference focused on machine learning, automation, robotics, and space. There were over one hundred talks, sessions, and workshops held by Amazon and industry leaders that showcased leading advancements in robotics and automation, including telerobotic hands that transmit touch to haptic gloves from HaptX, SynTouch, and Shadow Robot Company; an electric adventure vehicle from Rivian that integrates with Alexa; and an autonomous flying microbot from the Wyss Institute at Harvard University. Amazon also announced Prime Air’s new drone delivery design; a new AI-driven approach for Alexa skill developers called Alexa Conversations; and the Pegasus Drive sortation robot, used in Amazon sortation centers.
Amazon introduced the all-new Echo Show 5, which features a compact design, 5.5-inch display, rich sound, HD camera, and built-in camera shutter.
Amazon introduced the all-new Kindle Oasis, featuring its best Paperwhite display with the next generation of e-ink technology, which includes fast page turns, waterproofing, a color adjustable front light, and six months of Kindle Unlimited for free.
Amazon introduced the all-new Fire 7, the next generation of our best-selling tablet, featuring a faster processor, 16 GB of internal storage with support for up to 512 GB more via microSD, and hands-free access to Alexa.
Amazon announced the all-new Fire 7 Kids Edition tablet and Echo Dot Kids Edition, as well as the new Alexa Skill Blueprints that let families create personalized skills for Alexa-enabled devices. These devices rely on Amazon FreeTime, a service that helps parents manage the ways their kids interact with technology.
The number of Alexa-compatible smart home devices continues to grow, with more than 60,000 smart home products from over 7,400 unique brands. Additionally, Alexa Guard, a feature that helps customers protect their home by detecting the sounds of smoke alarms, carbon monoxide alarms, and glass breaking, is now widely available across the U.S. Alexa Guard can also be connected to customers’ existing ADT or Ring alarm systems.
There are now hundreds of third-party devices with Alexa built-in. Customers can access Alexa at home through select TVs from LG and ecobee’s newest smart thermostat, or on-the-go with new headphones from Bose and Jabra. Alexa is now integrated into even more vehicles from Lexus and Toyota, as well as select BMW and MINI vehicles in Germany and the U.K. Additionally, Garmin, iOttie, and Nextbase launched new automotive accessories that make it easy for customers to add Alexa to their current vehicle.
Amazon continues to expand Alexa’s features and capabilities. Alexa Announcements, which allows customers to broadcast a one-way message to their Alexa devices, is now available in Germany, France, Spain, Italy, and Mexico. Additionally, customers in the U.K. can make outbound calls with Alexa Outbound Calling, and with eligible Vodafone plans, can place and receive calls from an Echo device using their mobile number.
Customers can now set an Alexa Routine timed to sunset, sunrise, or when an alarm is dismissed; and delete their voice recordings by saying “Alexa, delete what I just said” or “Alexa, delete everything I said today.” Additionally, Amazon launched the Alexa Privacy Hub, which provides customers with information and control over their Alexa experience.
In Japan, Germany, and the U.K., Amazon introduced the ability for Alexa developers to earn money using in-skill purchasing for their skills.
Fire TV now has more than 34 million active users worldwide and continues to be the #1 streaming media player family in the U.S., U.K., Germany, Japan, and India.
Amazon and Google launched the official YouTube app on Fire TV devices and Fire TV Edition smart TVs, and released the Prime Video app for Chromecast, Chromecast built-in devices, and Android TV devices.
Prime Video received 47 Emmy nominations for its original programming, more than double from last year, including 20 nominations for The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and 11 nominations for Fleabag.
Prime Video premiered the Jonas Brothers documentary Chasing Happiness, and Original Series Good Omens, based on the novel by Neil Gaiman. In addition, Prime Video will debut new Original Series The Boys, from creators Evan Goldberg and Seth Rogen, on July 26, and Carnival Row, starring Orlando Bloom and Cara Delevingne, on August 30.
AmazonFresh expanded to Las Vegas with options for ultrafast one- and two-hour delivery, and introduced an expanded selection of products including tens of thousands of grocery items, plus bestselling items from Amazon.com.
Amazon continues to expand grocery delivery from Whole Foods Market, and is now available in nearly 90 metros in the U.S., offering Prime customers free delivery in as fast as an hour on thousands of natural and organic groceries and locally-sourced items.
Amazon Go, with a checkout-free experience enabled by our Just Walk Out Technology, expanded to New York City with two new stores. Amazon Go now has thirteen stores open in Seattle, Chicago, San Francisco, and New York.
Amazon Beauty announced that HAUS Laboratories, an exclusive makeup collection co-created by Lady Gaga and makeup artist Sarah Tanno, is now available for pre-order to customers worldwide.
Amazon Fashion introduced new, innovative shopping experiences, including The Drop, which gives customers in more than one hundred countries and regions exclusive access to limited-edition collections designed by fashion influencers via the Amazon App, and StyleSnap, an AI-powered feature that lets customers shop by simply taking a photograph or screenshot of an item.
Amazon Fashion continues to bring exclusive selection to customers, including clothing for babies and toddlers from Moon and Back in partnership with Hanna Andersson; a Levi’s collaboration to bring custom Levi’s Iconic 501 for him and Levi’s 721 High-Rise for her designed by pro football player Sterling Shepard and supermodel Chanel Iman Shepard; and Hanes Ultimate Baby collection. Additionally, customers can now shop Russell Wilson’s Good Man Brand, J/Slides, Tommy Hilfiger, and more.
Amazon launched Prime in the United Arab Emirates, offering free delivery on millions of local and international items, Prime Video, Twitch Prime, discounted same-day delivery, and Prime exclusive deals.
Amazon introduced Amazon Flex in India, a program that provides opportunities for local partners to deliver packages to grow delivery capacity for sellers and increase delivery speed for customers.
Amazon published its Small and Medium-Sized Business Impact Report and launched a “Build Your Business with Amazon” website to help entrepreneurs sell in Amazon’s stores. More than 1.9 million small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), content creators, and developers in the U.S. are currently working with Amazon. SMBs selling in Amazon’s stores have created an estimated 1.6 million jobs worldwide.
Amazon began hiring for its Arlington headquarters, with plans to hire 25,000 highly-skilled employees over the next decade. Amazon unveiled development plans for the first phase of construction for its new urban campus, which includes the redevelopment of vacant warehouses into two new LEED Gold-certified buildings, new retail space for area businesses, and centrally-located community green space.
Amazon announced that it will hire nearly 12,000 new employees across Europe in 2019, taking its permanent workforce in Europe to nearly 95,000 by the end of 2019.
Amazon pledged to upskill 100,000 of its employees across the U.S. by 2025, dedicating over $700 million to provide employees across its corporate offices, tech hubs, fulfillment centers, retail stores, and transportation network with access to training programs that will help them move into more highly-skilled roles within or outside of the company. Programs include Machine Learning University, Amazon Technical Academy, and Career Choice.
Amazon was named the Marketplace Innovator of the Year at the 2019 Disability:IN Inclusion Awards for the accessibility of its products, services, and experiences across the company.
Amazon announced its latest effort to fight homelessness with an $8 million donation to housing and homeless nonprofits in its HQ regions — $5 million to Plymouth Housing in Seattle and $3 million to the Arlington Community Foundation in Arlington — and an employee donation match campaign to select charities that address housing and homelessness in both regions.
Amazon announced the early completion of its commitment to host 50 solar systems on its fulfillment and sortation center rooftops globally by 2020. Additionally, the Solar Energy Industries Association’s 2018 Solar Means Business Report ranked Amazon #1 in the U.S. for the amount of corporate on-site solar installed in 2018 and #2 for the total amount of solar installed to date. Globally, Amazon has 61 operating solar and wind projects that are expected to generate over 1,044 megawatts and deliver over 3.1 million megawatt hours of energy annually.
Amazon India introduced the Packaging-Free Shipment program in nine cities, which reduces waste by shipping orders in their original packaging and combining multiple shipments in a reusable crate or a corrugate box. This is one of several initiatives that support Shipment Zero, Amazon’s vision to make all Amazon shipments net zero carbon.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced several new customer commitments and major migrations during the quarter: National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing (NASCAR) has chosen AWS and Amazon SageMaker as its standard for cloud-based machine learning and artificial intelligence workloads; Emirates NBD, a leading bank in the Middle East, is using AWS machine learning services to build a personalized retail customer banking experience; Hyundai Electric & Energy Systems (Hyundai Electric), Korea’s leading electric power equipment manufacturer, launched a new high performance computing (HPC) system leveraging AWS to accelerate its digital transformation; and Sony Music Entertainment Japan selected Amazon Managed Blockchain in the development of a digital music rights management system.
AWS announced the general availability of Amazon Personalize, a fully-managed machine learning service that trains, tunes, and deploys custom, private machine learning models. The service brings the same machine learning technology used by Amazon.com to engage with millions of shoppers to AWS customers, so they can easily develop applications with a wide array of personalization use cases, including specific product recommendations, individualized search results, and customized direct marketing — with no machine learning experience required.
AWS announced the general availability of AWS Ground Station, a service that makes it easy and cost-effective for customers to control their satellites using AWS and download data into AWS Global Infrastructure Regions using a fully-managed network of ground station antennas located around the world. With AWS Ground Station, customers can more easily and cost-effectively control satellite operations, ingest satellite data, and integrate the data with applications and other cloud services running in AWS, saving up to 80% of their ground station costs by paying for antenna access time on demand. Capella Space, D-Orbit, Maxar Technologies, Myriota, NSLComm, Open Cosmos, Spire, and Thales Alenia Space are among the customers and partners using AWS Ground Station.
AWS announced the general availability of Amazon Managed Blockchain, a fully-managed service that makes it easy to create and manage scalable blockchain networks that allow multiple parties to execute transactions and maintain a cryptographically verifiable record without the need for a trusted, central authority. Amazon Managed Blockchain also scales to support thousands of applications and millions of transactions using popular open source frameworks like Hyperledger Fabric and Ethereum.
AWS announced the general availability of Amazon Textract, a fully-managed machine learning service that automatically extracts text and data, including from tables and forms, in virtually any document without the need for manual review, custom code, or machine learning experience. With Amazon Textract, customers can more easily and accurately process millions of document pages in just a few hours, significantly lowering document processing costs, and allowing customers to focus on deriving business value from their text and data instead of wasting time and effort on post-processing.
AWS announced the general availability of AWS Control Tower, a service that makes it as easy for customers to set up and continuously govern secure, compliant, multi-account AWS environments as it is to select items from a menu. AWS Control Tower gives customers a pre-configured environment built according to AWS best-practices, with clearly defined rules for security, operations, and compliance. AWS Control Tower provides ongoing governance on how to “get it right” based on AWS’s experience helping thousands of enterprise customers create secure and compliant cloud environments.
AWS announced the general availability of AWS Security Hub, a service that gives customers a central place to manage security and compliance across an AWS environment. AWS Security Hub aggregates, organizes, and prioritizes security findings from AWS services such as Amazon GuardDuty, Amazon Inspector, and Amazon Macie, and from a large and growing list of AWS Partner Network solutions, to provide a comprehensive view of a customer’s overall security and compliance status.
AWS announced the general availability of Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK), a fully-managed service that makes it easy for developers to build and run highly available, secure, and scalable applications based on Apache Kafka without having to worry about managing the underlying infrastructure. Fully compatible with Apache Kafka, it enables customers to easily migrate their on-premises or Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute (Amazon EC2) clusters to Amazon MSK with no code changes.
At the AWS Public Sector Summit in Washington, D.C., George Mason University and Northern Virginia Community College, in collaboration with AWS Educate, introduced a Bachelor of Applied Science pathway in cloud computing. This degree offers students a seamless transfer pathway from a two-year associate’s degree to a four-year bachelor’s degree in the cloud, providing a clear path to high-demand careers in cloud computing with AWS partners and customers.
Since launching in 2016, the number of databases migrated to AWS using the AWS Database Migration Service has grown to more than 150,000 databases.
For the ninth consecutive year, AWS is positioned in the Leader’s quadrant in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), earning the highest placement for “Ability to Execute” and “Completeness of Vision,” and we have widened the gap between AWS and all others in the report.