Amazon made obscene amounts of money in 2018

Internet giant Amazon made $232.9 billion last year, which was up 31% from the previous year.

The increase was almost exactly the same percentage at the previous year, indicating Amazon’s impressive growth is showing no sign of slowing. Its Q4 revenue growth was a mere 20% to $72.4 billion, but net income was up 58% to $3 billion, which helped amazon reach $10.1 billion net income for the full year, more than triple what it managed in 2017.

By far the main reason Amazon is suddenly so much more profitable is AWS – its cloud services division. Considering its origins as a way to monetize surplus datacentre capacity, it’s especially impressive that this division raked in $25.6 billion last year, yielding an operating income of $7.3 billion. For some reason CEO Jeff Bezos chose to bang on about Amazon’s voice UI platform Alexa instead in his earnings comments.

“Alexa was very busy during her holiday season,” he said. “Echo Dot was the best-selling item across all products on Amazon globally, and customers purchased millions more devices from the Echo family compared to last year. The number of research scientists working on Alexa has more than doubled in the past year, and the results of the team’s hard work are clear.

“In 2018, we improved Alexa’s ability to understand requests and answer questions by more than 20% through advances in machine learning, we added billions of facts making Alexa more knowledgeable than ever, developers doubled the number of Alexa skills to over 80,000, and customers spoke to Alexa tens of billions more times in 2018 compared to 2017. We’re energized by and grateful for the response, and you can count on us to keep working hard to bring even more invention to customers.”

Great, thanks for that Jeff. One other business segment that’s worth noting is appropriately enough, ‘other’. This covers advertising – in this case premium positioning on the Amazon site, especially for Prime subscribers of which there are over 100 million – and it doubled its revenue in the quarter. Thankless investors still drove Amazon’s share price down by 5%, ironically enough, after it announced it expects to increase its investment spend this year.