Shares of Amazon were up nearly 10 percent Friday morning after the tech giant posted its biggest quarterly profit ever on Thursday.
The company’s stock was trading at around $660 per share at 9 a.m. PT, which is approaching the all-time high of $696 per share. Amazon has a market capitalization of around $310 billion.
Investors were pleased with Amazon’s financials from Q1 2016, during which the Seattle company crushed expectations for both revenue and profit. It posted earnings per share of $1.07, beating estimates of $0.58 per share and up from a net loss of $0.12 per share a year ago. It also beat revenue expectations with $29.1 billion, compared to estimates of $28 billion and up from $22.7 billion in the year-ago quarter.
This marks the fourth consecutive quarter for Amazon posting a profit, and the $1.07 EPS is the company’s largest quarterly profit ever.
Since going public in 1997, Amazon has traditionally re-invested its earnings back into the business, which prevented the company from posting substantial profits. More recently, some critics grew wary of Amazon’s lack of profit, but its stock price continued to rise regardless.
But thanks to a cash cow called Amazon Web Services, the company is silencing those critics with legitimate profit, while also continuing to post substantial revenue numbers.
Amazon's Q1 revenue:
2016 $29.1 billion
2015 $22.7 billion
2014 $19.7 billion
2013 $16.1 billion
2012 $13.2 billion
2011 $9.9 billion— Jon Erlichman (@JonErlichman) April 28, 2016
Beyond AWS, the company’s cloud computing arm used by customers like Netflix and Apple that made $2.5 billion last quarter, Amazon said it is also seeing steady sales from its hardware line.
“Amazon devices are the top selling products on Amazon, and customers purchased more than twice as many Fire tablets than first quarter last year,” Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said in a statement. “Earlier this week, the $39 Fire TV Stick became the first product ever — from any manufacturer — to pass 100,000 customer reviews, including over 62,000 5 star reviews, also more than any other product ever sold on Amazon. Echo too is off to an incredible start, and we can’t yet manage to keep it in stock despite all efforts. We’re building premium products at non-premium prices, and we’re thrilled so many customers are responding to our approach.”
Amazon had another busy quarter, unveiling new hardware, expanding its logistics infrastructure, adding more cities for same-day delivery and changing its leadership structure. The company also debuted a new monthly Prime subscription program, directly challenging Netflix.
Even though Amazon is posting record-high profits, don’t expect the company to stop investing huge amounts of cash into its business. Amazon said it will “significantly increase content spend” for its Prime streaming TV and movie service; it is also renting airplanes and buying trucks to help support its massive delivery infrastructure.
Amazon’s stock is up nearly than 50 percent in the past year.
Editor’s note: This story was updated to reflect Amazon’s all-time high stock price of $696 per share.
