Amazon earnings q1 2018

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Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has not dared to crack the South Korean market, where Coupang is the fastest-growing and best financed e-commerce site of all time.

Amazon reported its first-quarter earnings results on Thursday after the bell.

It’s a huge beat across the board and Amazon stock is up over 7 percent in after hour trading.

Here are the most important numbers:

• Revenue: $51.04 billion vs. $49.78 billion, as estimated, according to Thomson Reuters
• EPS: $3.27 per share vs $1.26 per share, as estimated, according to Thomson Reuters (not comparable)
• AWS revenue: $5.44 billion vs. $5.25 billion, as estimated, according to FactSet

Amazon’s revenue, which includes sales from Whole Foods, increased 43 percent year-over-year. Its North America revenue jumped 46 percent to $30.7 billion, while international sales grew 34 percent to $14.8 billion.

Amazon’s cloud unit, AWS, continued to be the growth driver of the company. For the quarter, AWS sales grew 49 percent year-over-year, to $5.44 billion, while generating $1.4 billion in operating income, a whopping 73 percent share of Amazon’s total operating income.

In a prepared statement, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos highlighted the massive success of AWS.

“AWS had the unusual advantage of a seven-year head start before facing like-minded competition, and the team has never slowed down,” said Bezos. “As a result, the AWS services are by far the most evolved and most functionality-rich.”

During the earnings call, investors will look for clues around Amazon’s plans for political damage control, further growth in its dominant cloud service, and investments in new segments, like Alexa and logistics.

Amazon continues to outperform the market with its stock up over 20 percent this year.

Amazon gave revenue guidance in the range of $51.0 billion to $54.0 billion, in-line with street estimate of $52.2 billion.