This week has seen a number of the major players announce their latest quarter financial results. All of the announcements refer to the first quarter of 2016 and as well as providing an insight into how companies are doing quarter-to-quarter, they also provide insight to what can be expected from the companies going forward and throughout the rest of this year. Twitter posted two days ago and while their monthly active users was certainly up, the company revenue fell short, due to a less than ideal increase in digital advertising revenue. In contrast, Facebook reported yesterday and their daily and monthly active users and their revenue were all considerable up and all beating expectations. Next up is Amazon and once again, it looks like the online company has also significantly beaten expectations for Q1, 2016.
In terms of the big headline points, Amazon has today announced revenue for Q1 as $29.1 billion. This equates to a 28-percent year-over-year increase from last year’s $22.7 billion and easily surpasses the $27.9 billion which had been expected. Adding to this, the profits announced by Amazon for the quarter came in at $513 million, which marks their highest-ever profits per quarter and is a stark contrast to the $57 million loss reported for the same period last year. As a result, Earnings Per Share (EPS) came in at $1.07, which is close to double the $0.57 that had been expected. Results which overall have now led to Amazon suggesting Q2 revenue for 2016 should be somewhere in the region of $28 billion and $30.5 billion.
While Amazon has pushed significantly into the hardware field over the last year with the introductions of a number of new products including their Fire TV, Fire TV Stick, Echo and the rest of the Fire hardware range, the company has not provided firm figures on how these products performed during the last quarter. However, the results posting did highlight that “Amazon devices are the top selling products on Amazon” and further adding that “twice as many Fire tablets” were sold in Q1 of this year compared to the same quarter of last year. While also announcing that the Fire TV Stick “became the first product ever — from any manufacturer — to pass 100,000 customer reviews” and that the Amazon Echo “is off to an incredible start.”