. . . BUT AMAZON SALES SOAR 39pc

A BOOM at Amazon’s cloud computing arm helped the tech giant rake in sales of £40bn – or £439m per day.

Sales were up 39pc in the three months to the end of June, and profits rose 12 times to £1.9bn.

Amazon Web Services raked in £4.6bn, up 48pc, as it tightens its grip on the thriving cloud computing market. Shares jumped 2pc to $1,860 in after-hours trading on the Nasdaq, adding £3bn to founder Jeff Bezos’s stake.

Worth $900bn last night, Amazon is getting closer to becoming the first $1 trillion company. Amazon was one of the first to get into cloud computing in 2006. It has managed to hang onto about a third of the cloud computing market even as it has tripled in size over the latest four years – fending off major competition from Microsoft, Google and Alibaba.

Its retail sales leapt 45pc to £24bn in North America and 27pc to £10bn internationally, during the quarter. Bezos, 54, talked up the success of Amazon’s virtual assistant Alexa. He said: ‘The number of Alexa-enabled devices has more than tripled in the past year.’