Retailer soars, other giants stumble

Amazon: Cash flows in

A huge holiday season drove Amazon to a record profit, fueled by the company’s dominance in ecommerce and cloud computing even as it pushes into new businesses such as advertising, entertainment and groceries.

The results reassured investors that Amazon’s spending on its various initiatives poses no threat of distractions to its main businesses. Revenue growth is accelerating even as the company is expected to cross $200 billion in sales this year.

Sales gained 38 percent to $60.5 billion in the fourth quarter, the biggest growth increase in the period since 2009, when revenue jumped 42 percent — with much smaller sales numbers, of course. Net income was $1.9 billion, or $3.75 per share, the Seattle

company said. Analysts projected earnings of $1.83 per share on sales of $59.8 billion. Amazon said the earnings included a $789 million benefit in the quarter as a result of the new U.S. tax law.

Chief Financial Officer Brian Olsavsky said the advertising business and Amazon Web Services, the company’s profitable cloud-computing unit, were strong contributors to the quarterly sales growth. Revenue from AWS increased 45 percent to $5.1 billion.

Amazon consistently delivers big sales gains and plows most of the money back into the company. It equips warehouses with robots, builds new data centers, invents new products and updates devices like its voice-activated Echo digital speaker, which Amazon sees as key to getting a foothold in customers’ homes and vehicles.

The company spent $13.7 billion last year on the 460-store Whole Foods grocery chain to become a more serious player in the $800 billion grocery market and enter a brick-and-mortar retail business dominated by Walmart. It added more than 200,000 workers in the first nine months of 2017 and it keeps expanding its international reach, with operations in India, Australia and Latin America.

Online sales increased 20 percent to $35.4 billion, slower than third-quarter growth of 22 percent. Sales at physical stores, mostly Whole Foods, were $4.5 billion.