Amazon earnings live updates: Wall Street watching for cloud demand, advertising strength
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy
Amazon will report fourth-quarter earnings on Thursday after the closing bell.
Analysts are upbeat about the firm’s year-end performance. Strong holiday demand and ad-revenue growth are among the positive drivers.
The earnings-release time is shortly after 4 p.m. ET, and its conference call with analysts will start around 5 p.m.
Amazon’s stock was up 8% year-to-date through Wednesday’s close, outpacing the the S&P 500’s 3% gain.
Bank of America: Looking for strength in cloud and AI demand.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy
Amazon should deliver a solid fourth-quarter report, as holiday-boosted retail growth will deliver an above-consensus operating profit of $19.7 billion. The firm’s AWS cloud platform will likely meet expectations for 19% to 20% growth, BofA said, thanks to rising AI contributions.
Drivers to cloud demand include, “Amazon’s growing partnership with Anthropic, new competitive AI offerings (including Nova models and lower infrastructure costs on Trainium), and ramping GPU supply (greater Nvidia chip supply as well as the launch of Nvidia’s Blackwell chips & cloud products).”
But there are risks moving forward. The bank lowered its first-quarter revenue amid tariff and currency headwinds and cited that AWS margins may have peaked in 2024 amid favorable demand.
BofA maintains a “Buy” rating on Amazon and a price objective of $255, or 8% above the firm’s current share price.
Amazon’s consensus fourth-quarter net sales estimate is $187.32 billion.
4th quarter
- Net sales estimate: $187.32 billion
- Online stores net sales estimate: $74.71 billion
- Physical Stores net sales estimate: $5.4 billion
- Third-Party Seller Services net sales estimate: $48.02 billion
- Subscription Services net sales estimate: $11.58 billion
- AWS net sales estimate: $28.82 billion
- North America net sales estimate: $114.27 billion
- International net sales estimate: $44.13 billion
- Third-party seller services net sales excluding F/X estimate: +10.2%
- Subscription services net sales excluding F/X estimate: +10.3%
- Amazon Web Services net sales excluding F/X estimate: +19%
- EPS estimate: $1.50
- Operating income estimate: $18.84 billion
- Operating margin estimate: 10.1%
- North America operating margin estimate: +6.48%
- International operating margin estimate: 3.08%
- Fulfillment expense estimate: $28.45 billion
- Seller unit mix estimate: 60.2%
1st quarter
- Net sales estimate: $158.64 billion
- Operating income estimate: $18.24 billion
(Source: Bloomberg data)
