Amazon Inc.(AMZN, Financial)Â released its first-quarter earnings for 2015 after the bell on Thursday. The company reported a loss for the quarter, which wasn't a shocker at all. Wall Street expected a loss, but Wall Street didn't expect the company sales gains that top analysts forecast. The big news for investors and the street was that Amazon's Cloud computing service had net sales of $1.6 billion. That reporting the firm's first-quarter earnings, Amazon stock was up in after-hour trading.
Key metrics
During the first quarter Amazon operating cash flow increased 47% to $7.84 billion compared to last year's $5.35 billion for the first quarter. Free cash flow increased to $3.16 billion compared to the previous first quarter of $1.49 billion. The company's net sales increased 15% to $22.72 billion compared to the previous first quarter of $19.74 billion. Operating income increased 74% to $255 million compared to $144 million in first quarter of last year. Amazon reported an net loss of $57 million or $0.12 per share, compared to an net income of $108 million, or $0.23 per share in last years first quarter.
Amazon Web Service (AWS)
The company's Amazon Web Service is the largest cloud computing infrastructure player in the market today. Amazon reported the its Amazon Web Service was now a $5 billion business and still growing. The company's web service business had sales of $1.5 billion and a $255 million profit for the quarter. Amazon Web Service is on track to do $1 billion in annual profits.
Jeff Benzo's said, “Born a decade ago, AWS is a good example of how we approach ideas and risk-taking at Amazon. We strive to focus relentlessly on the customer, innovate rapidly, and drive operational excellence. We manage by two seemingly contradictory traits: impatience to deliver faster and a willingness to think long term. We are so grateful to our AWS customers and remain dedicated to inventing on their behalf.”
Highlights from Amazon's first -quarter report
- Amazon launched Dash Button — a small button that Prime customers can place in their home and use to reorder frequently used household items. Today, customers can chose from 18 popular brands, such as Bounty, Huggies and Clorox.
- Amazon announced the Dash Replenishment Service (DRS), a new service that enables connected devices to order goods fromAmazon when supplies are running low — like a coffee maker that automatically orders more coffee beans. By using DRS, device makers are able to leverage Amazon’s authentication and payment systems, customer service, and fulfillment network. Early adopters of DRS include Whirlpool, Quirky, Brother, and Brita.
- Amazon announced new features for Amazon Fire TV and Fire TV Stick, including X-Ray (now available directly on your HDTV), support for a captive portal to connect to Wi-Fi at a hotel or dorm room, and new shortcuts. Amazon Fire TV also added expandable USB storage and private listening with support for Bluetooth headphones.
- In just one year, Amazon Fire TV apps and games selection is up 5x, including Sling TV, Fox Sports Go, Flappy Birds Family, TED,WSJ Live, Crossy Road, and Game of Thrones - A Telltale Game Series.
- Fire TV Stick launched in the U.K. and Germany, joining Amazon Fire TV. Pre-orders for Fire TV Stick on Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.de broke all previous records for Amazon devices in the first week of availability.
- Amazon Echo continues to get smarter as more customers use it and provide feedback — new features include Pandora integration, home automation, support for sports scores and schedules, traffic reports and route suggestions, and voice control for customers if listening to music via Bluetooth. Amazon has released a limited preview of the Alexa SDK to enable developers, content creators, and service providers to build apps and experiences for Echo.
- Amazon launched unlimited cloud storage with Amazon Cloud Drive — two new storage plans for customers to securely store new and existing content collections. The Unlimited Everything Plan provides unlimited storage for photos, videos, movies, music and files, and the Unlimited Photos Plan provides unlimited photo storage plus 5 GB of additional storage for videos, documents, or other files — all for a low annual fee. Customers can sign up for a free 3-month trial on either plan.
- Prime Now has expanded to Miami, Baltimore, Dallas, Atlanta, and Austin. Prime members can choose from tens of thousands of daily essentials through a mobile app. With Prime Now, two-hour delivery is free and one-hour delivery is available for $7.99.
- Amazon Prime celebrated its 10-year anniversary with tens of millions of Prime members around the world. Prime members in the U.S. enjoy unlimited Free Two-Day Shipping on more than 20 million items, unlimited streaming of tens of thousands of movies and TV episodes with Prime Instant Video, more than one million songs and hundreds of playlists with Prime Music, unlimited photo storage with Prime Photos, and access to more than 800,000 books to borrow with the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library.
- Amazon Studios announced that full seasons of Mad Dogs, The Man in the High Castle, The New Yorker Presents, and children’s shows Just Add Magic and The Stinky & Dirty Show will debut exclusively for Prime members in the U.S., U.K. and Germany. Amazon Studios also greenlit second seasons of Mozart in the Jungle and Bosch, as well as original kids series Tumble Leaf,Creative Galaxy, Annedroids, and Gortimer Gibbon’s Life on Normal Street.
- Amazon introduced Amazon@Purdue, our first staffed on-campus pick-Cup and drop-off location at Purdue University. Amazon Student and Amazon Prime members get Free One-Day Shipping on textbooks and Free One-Day Pickup on over one million items when shipped to the Amazon@Purdue location.
- Amazon officially launched Write On by Kindle, an online community where writers and readers share in the creative process. Readers can check out works-in-progress — from short stories to novels — and offer feedback, or they can try their hand at writing a story themselves.
- Amazon launched Amazon Home Services, a new marketplace for on-demand professional services, backed by Amazon’s Happiness Guarantee. Customers can browse, purchase, and schedule hundreds of professional services directly on Amazon.comin less than 60 seconds. Amazon Home Services features handpicked pros offering upfront pricing on pre-packaged services with helpful reviews from customers that have made verified purchase
- Poppy J. Anderson became the first German author to sell over one million Kindle books using Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP), joining the Kindle Million Club with many other internationally successful KDP authors such as John Locke, J.A. Konrath and Tina Folsom.
- Amazon expanded public fulfillment center tours to the U.K., Germany, France and Poland. Visit www.amazon.com/fctours for information on available tour locations, dates, and times.
- Amazon Prime members in Spain now receive Free One-Day Shipping with their Prime subscription.
- Amazon Fashion, which has emerged as a top category on Amazon.in, partnered with the Fashion Design Council of India as the official title sponsor of the 25th edition of India Fashion Week.
- Amazon.in launched the Amazon Seller App, a best-in-class mobile app for sellers in India, which makes it easy and convenient for sellers to update inventory, source and list new items on Amazon.in, and respond faster to customer queries.
- Amazon.in launched Kirana Now, a pilot service that delivers everyday essentials to customers within two to four hours. This local service utilizes India’s vast network of small and medium businesses to achieve quick, easy, and convenient delivery for Amazon.in customers.
- Amazon China opened an Amazon international brand flagship store on Tmall, which features thousands of Amazon China’s popular, directly imported products. Additionally, Amazon Global Store selection on Amazon.cn has grown to over one million items.
- AWS announced Amazon Machine Learning, a fully managed service that makes it easy for any developer to use historical data to build predictive models that can be used for a broad array of purposes, including detecting problematic transactions, preventing customer churn, and improving customer support. Amazon Machine Learning is based on the same proven, highly scalable machine learning technology used by developers across Amazon to generate more than 50 billion predictions a week.
- AWS announced AWS Marketplace for Desktop Apps, a new category on the AWS Marketplace that makes it easy for customers to search for and buy applications for their Amazon WorkSpaces cloud-based desktops. Customers can choose from a broad selection of more than 100 applications in eleven categories, and pay by the month for the applications they use. To simplify deployment of these desktop applications, AWS also announced Amazon WorkSpaces Application Manager (Amazon WAM), a new service that packages and delivers applications to Amazon WorkSpaces.
- AWS announced the general availability of AWS Lambda, a computer service that runs developers’ code in response to events and automatically manages the required computer resources, making it easy to build and manage applications that respond quickly to new information. AWS also launched several new features to make it easy for mobile developers to use Lambda for mobile, tablet, and Internet of Things applications.
- AWS announced the general availability of the Amazon EC2 Container Service, a high-performance container management service that makes it easy to run distributed applications using Docker containers on AWS. AWS also added the ability to use Elastic Block Store (“EBS”) and Elastic Load Balancing (“ELB”) with the EC2 Container Service, as well as a new, flexible container scheduler that combine to make the EC2 Container Service the best place to run containers in production.
- AWS introduced the latest generation of Amazon EC2 Dense-storage (D2) instances, and larger, faster Amazon Elastic Block Storage (Amazon EBS) volumes. To support very large transactional databases and big data analytics, the new Amazon EC2 D2 instances offer up to 48 TB of storage and up to 3,500 MB per second of disk read throughput, while the new Amazon EBS volumes store up to 16 TB and process up to 20,000 input/output operations per second (IOPS).
