What you need to know
- Amazon announced its Q2 2023 financial earnings on Thursday.
- The company reported $134.4 billion in revenue, up 11% year-over-year.
- Amazon expects a positive Q3, which likely got a boost from the two-day Prime Day sales event that was held in July.
Amazon is among the last major tech companies to report its quarterly financial earnings for this season, ending things on a pretty positive note as it announces $134.4 billion in revenue, an 11% jump compared to the same period last year.
Aside from an uptick in North American sales, the company attributes the positive growth to Amazon Web Services (AWS), which saw revenue increase 12% for the quarter.
"Our AWS growth stabilized as customers started shifting from cost optimization to new workload deployment," said Amazon CEO Andy Jassy in a statement, highlighting the company's cloud and generative AI efforts at a time when the latter has become a hot topic among Big Tech and consumers.
Jassy also noted growth in Amazon's advertising business, which grew 22% year-over-year to nearly $10.7 billion.
The company recently held its annual Prime Day sales event, which lasted for two days in July. Amazon boasts that it was the "biggest Prime Day event ever," which shifted 375 million items and helped customers save more than $2.5 billion. While Prime Day numbers have no bearing on Q2 earnings, the company expects to see positive growth between 9% and 13% for Q3 revenue.
Jassy also highlighted Amazon's ongoing investment in AI across its products. He notes that Amazon has multiple generative AI initiatives throughout the company, and while Amazon hasn't been as loud as Google and Microsoft when it comes to its efforts, the company has hinted that it's working to build ChatGPT-like features into its AI assistant. "You can just imagine what we're working on with respect to Alexa," Jassy teased during the earnings call.
