Amazon’s fourth quarter sales reached a total of $60.5 billion according to the massive e-commerce giant who recently posted its Q4 earnings results on Thursday, February 1. For Amazon, this is an increase of 38-percent compared to the sales it had reported for the fourth quarter of 2016, which were only at a total of $43.7 billion. This also marks Amazon’s eleventh straight profitable quarter. Amazon is no stranger to selling all kinds of products and having its hands in more than a few different industries. Perhaps it comes as nor surprise then, that a large portion of Amazon’s sales comes from items like its own smart speaker and streaming TV box products, as Amazon notes that the Echo Dot and the Amazon Fire TV Stick were the two best-selling items across Amazon for the entire year of 2017.
In addition to increasing its net sales in the fourth quarter year on year, Amazon also saw large shipments of items to members who subscribe to its Prime service. Amazon states that over five billion items were shipped to Prime members globally. This of course doesn’t mean that it shipped items to around five billion members, just that members ordered this number of products throughout the year.
Amazon didn’t just see an increase in net sales. It’s operating cash flow jumped up from the same period in 2016 as well, increasing from $17.3 billion in December of 2016 to $18.4 billion just last year, which is a seven-percent increase. Its operating income increased too, jumping up by 69-percent to a total of $2.1 billion at the end of the fourth quarter in 2017 from just $1.3 billion at the same time the year before. Aside from the numbers revolving around Amazon’s revenue and profits, the company highlighted other big milestones for 2017 in its Q4 earnings report, such as Alexa now having over 30,000 different skills which consumers are able to interact with, and celebrating ten years of its Kindle device by lunching the all-new Kindle Oasis. It also saw a huge number of viewers for its Thursday Night Football exclusive airing which would seem to validate that purchasing up the rights to show Thursday night games was a smart move for the company. Of course, more recent milestones included the launch of Amazon Go, its super smart convenient store which is packed with cameras and sensors, and allows consumers to enter, shop, and exit the store all without having to deal with checking out.