Amazon.com Announces Fourth Quarter Sales up 21% to $87.4 Billion
Amazon.com reported its fourth quarter results Thursday and sparked a surge in share value in extended trading.
The 12% increase for the company’s share price to $2,100 at 4.16pm ET gave a huge boost to the already-substantial fortune of its founder Jeff Bezos.
The world’s richest person added $13.2 billion to his net worth in just 15 minutes, meaning a total fortune of around $130 billion according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Last November he had lost $16.2 billion year-to-date and for a time slipped to second place behind Bill Gates.
Founder and CEO Bezos holds around 12% of Amazon stock.
The late surge for Amazon.com stock put the company’s value above $1 trillion.
Better than expected
Amazon’s financial results exceeded Wall Street expectations with fourth quarter sales up 21% to $87.4 Billion.
Operating income increased to $3.9 billion in the fourth quarter, compared with operating income of $3.8 billion in fourth quarter 2018.
Net income increased to $3.3 billion in the fourth quarter, or $6.47 per diluted share, compared with net income of $3.0 billion, or $6.04 per diluted share, in fourth quarter 2018.
For the whole of 2019, net sales increased 20% to $280.5 billion, compared with $232.9 billion in 2018.
Operating income increased to $14.5 billion, compared with operating income of $12.4 billion in 2018.
Net income increased to $11.6 billion, or $23.01 per diluted share, compared with net income of $10.1 billion, or $20.14 per diluted share, in 2018.
The exceptional results follow better-than-expected results for Apple announced earlier this week while Facebook disappointed.
“Prime membership continues to get better for customers year after year. And customers are responding — more people joined Prime this quarter than ever before, and we now have over 150 million paid Prime members around the world,” said Jeff Bezos. “We’ve made Prime delivery faster — the number of items delivered to US customers with Prime’s free one-day and same-day delivery more than quadrupled this quarter compared to last year.
During 2019, Amazon Business launched in Canada and now serves commercial and public sector organizations of all sizes in Canada. Amazon Business also launched Business Prime in Canada.
