Amazon fastest growing firm in India: Bezos
San Francisco: Amazon on Thursday delivered strongerthan-expected financial results for the first quarter, pushing shares higher.
Profit rose 41 per cent from a year ago to $724 million (roughly `4,650 crores), on revenues growing 23 percent to $35.7 billion (roughly `2,29,320 crores).
Amazon founder and chief executive Jeff Bezos used the earnings report to highlight the company’s efforts to expand in India.
“Our India team is moving fast and delivering for customers and sellers,” Bezos said. “The team has increased Prime selection by 75 percent since launching the program nine months ago, increased fulfillment capacity for sellers by 26 percent already this year, announced 18 Indian Original TV series, and just last week introduced a Fire TV Stick optimised for Indian customers with integrated voice search in English and Hindi.”
“We’re grateful that customers are responding Amazon.in is the most visited and the fastest growing marketplace in India,” he added. “It’s still Day 1 for e-commerce in India, and I assure you that we’ll keep investing in technology and infrastructure while working hard to invent on behalf of our customers and small and medium businesses in India.”
Later, answering a question related to Amazon’s commitment to the Indian market, Brian T. Olsavsky, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Office at Amazon said, “As far as level of investment is concerned, it is certainly one of our important investment areas. We see a lot of potential for the country and our business there.”
The results fueled a 3.5 per cent jump in after-hours trade in shares of Amazon, which has leveraged its position as an online retailer to push into streaming video, cloud computing and other segments as it expands its global footprint.
A big chunk of growth came from Amazon Web Services, the huge cloud-computing unit that powers internet services for business.
AWS revenue grew 43 percent to $3.7 billion (roughly `23,755 crores), pulling in operating profits of $890m (over `5,717crore).