Amazon wows Wall Street
Blows away forecasts for third quarter
Amazon has been on a hiring spree, increasing its staff by 77% in the past year to 541,900 full- and part-time workers, largely because of its purchase of Whole Foods as well as a rapid buildout of its regional warehouses.
That number doesn’t include the more than 120,000 seasonal jobs it says it expects to hire for over the holidays.
Another staffing bump came from Amazon’s acquisition of Souq.com, a Middle East-based e-commerce company, in July. Amazon’s headcount is up 42% year over year without Souq and Whole Foods included, staff said on the company’s earnings call Thursday afternoon.
That keeps Amazon second only to Walmart, with 2.3 million workers, among publicly traded U.S. companies. Kroger, with 433,000, is No. 3, according to company filings.
The surge comes as the Seattle-based company announced its third-quarter earnings, blowing Wall Street’s expectations out of the water and causing its stock to leap 7.7%, to $1,045 per share in after-hours trading.
The consensus estimate from S&P Capital IQ had been for a Amazon loss of one cent per share. Amazon smashed that with a gain of 52 cents per share.
Despite increased spending, including of the newly completed purchase of Whole Foods Markets for $13.7 billion in August, net income rose to $256 million from $252 million a year ago.
The company reported revenue of $43.7 billion, up 34%, helped by $1.3 billion in sales at Whole Foods.
In its release, Amazon vowed to continue the downward pressure on prices at often-pricey Whole Foods, saying “the two companies together will pursue the vision of making high-quality, natural and organic food affordable to everyone.”
The staffing numbers come as
238 cities nationwide are vying to be the location of the company’s second headquarters, eager for the high-paying tech jobs and economic impact one of America’s biggest companies would bring. It expects to employ
50,000 in its second headquarters.
Once again, Amazon’s bottom line was buoyed by its hugely profitable cloud services division, AWS. This quarter it had revenue of $4.58 billion.