» One-day shipping spurs Amazon’s fourth-quarter profit,

SEATTLE — Amazon executives bet big in 2019 that consumers would spend more if they could get products delivered even faster. The Seattle technology and commerce giant spent most of the year and billions of dollars to make one-day delivery a reality for its best customers, and the bet appears to be paying off.

Amazon’s $3.3 billion fourth-quarter profit, reported late Thursday, blew past analyst expectations. Sales of $87.4 billion exceeded the company’s own forecasts, with cloud computing juggernaut Amazon Web Services contributing mightily. Investors bid up Amazon shares in afterhours trading, again taking the company’s market value over $1 trillion.

The company also disclosed it has more than 150 million paying customers for its Prime membership program, a closely watched metric last updated in April 2018, when CEO Jeff Bezos said 100 million people were part of the program.

Amazon’s fourth-quarter profit of $6.47 a share, up more than 7% from a year earlier, was well above the $3.98-per-share consensus estimate of Wall Street analysts. Many were expecting the company’s heavy spending on faster delivery for Prime customers to weigh on the bottom line.

Chief financial officer Brian Olsavsky said spending on the one-day shipping initiative in the fourth quarter was less than the $1.5 billion previously expected. Still, worldwide shipping costs reached nearly $12.9 billion in the fourth quarter, up 43%.