After the closing bell Thursday afternoon, Amazon AMZN put up a strong Q4 report, topping expectations on both earnings and sales. Earnings per share of $6.04 easily outpaced the $5.55 in the Zacks consensus, on $72.38 billion in revenues compared to the $71.73 billion anticipated.
Shares are down ever so slightly in late trading following the release, as Q1 guidance was a little lower than expected on the revenue side: $56-60 billion is now the guidance number from this Zacks Rank #2 (Buy) company prior to the report. Amazon Web Services (AWS) — its version of cloud services — beat estimates on the revenue side, while growing 46% year over year. This number has been coming down over time, which is to be expected when numbers get to these heights.
Subscriptions brought in $3.96 billion in the quarter, relatively flat compared with recent quarters. This suggests we may be seeing some saturation with Amazon’s Prime customer base, among other things. Amazon has now beaten earnings estimates in 8 of the last 10 quarters, with a trailing 4-quarter average beat of 91%.
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