Amazon shocks investors with $92 million profit

Amazon recorded a shock profit of $92 million in its latest quarter, despite analysts tipping it to lose cash.

The news saw shares jump 15 per cent, and comes on the back of a $126 million loss in the same period in 2014.

Overall revenue grew 20 per cent year-on-year to $23 billion in the three months ending June 2015, and boss Jeff Bezos listed a string of achievements from launching Prime Now to introducing 350 new features on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

He added: "The teams at Amazon have been working hard for customers."

Chairman of analyst group TechMarketView, Richard Holway, said: "Tonight Amazon demonstrated that it had a business model that could generate growth and profits. Just like Apple but unlike many of the SaaS and Cloud providers.

"We are entering a new period when making profits and generating cash is the new cool."

Elsewhere, Amazon Web Services (AWS) sales grew 81 per cent year-on-year to earn $1.8 billion in revenue in the cloud giant's latest quarter.

Profits also quadrupled year-on-year to bring in $391 million, up from $265 million in the previous quarter, the first three months of 2015.

The takings suggest AWS is already about to outdo Bezos's claim last quarter that AWS would pull in $5 billion a year.

It has already raked in $3.38 billion this year, and so could easily break the $5 billion barrier by the end of 2015.

Holway, said: "AWS is now a powerful unit that could stand on its own. [It would be] interesting to see whether Amazon will, indeed, spin it out."

Bezos also reacted to recent criticism from customers and environmental campaigners, who say Amazon should power its datacentres with 100 per cent green energy by 2020.

He said: "The teams at Amazon have been working hard for customers. [We] entered into agreements for new solar and wind farms enough to exceed our 2016 goal of 40 per cent renewable energy."

These agreements will see a solar farm and a wind farm built in the US, and will generate around 170,000 megawatt hours of solar power and 670,000 MWh of wind energy on an annual basis.

These will be used to power current and future AWS datacentres.