Amazon made $10.6 billion in three months, but layoffs may continue

On February 1, US time , Amazon released its fourth quarter 2023 and full year 2023 financial report.

The financial report shows that in 2023, Amazon's net sales reached US$574.8 billion, a year-on-year increase of 12%; net profit reached US$30.4 billion, while in 2022 the company suffered a net loss of US$2.7 billion.

What surprised Wall Street most was Amazon's fourth-quarter financial report, with net sales increasing 14% year-on-year to US$169.961 billion; revenue increased to US$13.2 billion, compared with only US$2.7 billion in the same period of 2022; net profit increased to US$10.6 billion, a 37-fold increase from US$300 million in the same period of 2022.

Amazon reported quarterly earnings per share that were far above all expectations, and its quarterly revenue of $13.2 billion was the highest in the company's history.

As for the reasons for the surge in performance, Amazon stated in its financial report that it was mainly due to the strategy of cutting costs, improving delivery efficiency and further penetrating the advertising market.

In addition, many sub-sectors performed very well this quarter. For example, sales of North American business increased by 13% to $105.5 billion, and sales of international business increased by 17% to $40.2 billion. These two figures played a significant role in promoting Amazon's outstanding performance in the fourth quarter.

Surprisingly, when asked whether layoffs were over after the release of this eye-catching financial report, Amazon Chief Financial Officer Brian Olsavsky said: "(The company) is adding people in some areas, but most teams generally believe that we want to control the number of people, and may even reduce the number of people, because we can improve the efficiency of the scale of the business."

In other words, the layoffs of this giant may continue. It is understood that since 2022, when Amazon suffered overcapacity and losses due to excessive expansion, it has been working hard to reduce costs and increase efficiency, and large-scale layoffs and reductions in recruitment are an important part of "cost reduction".

In January of this year alone, there were a lot of reports of layoffs at Amazon.

First , in early January, an insider revealed that Twitch, a live streaming website owned by Amazon, plans to lay off about 500 employees, accounting for about 35% of the total number of employees. This layoff is also the second round of large-scale layoffs at Twitch in less than a year.

At the same time, Amazon announced that its Prime Video and MGM Studios will lay off hundreds of employees.

A few days later, news broke that Audible, the audiobook company owned by Amazon, would also lay off nearly 5% of its employees.

Amazon then confirmed to the media that the company was laying off some employees in the Buy with Prime department. Fortunately, it only affected less than 5% of the employees in the department.

According to incomplete statistics, Amazon has laid off at least 27,000 employees since the end of 2022. In addition to personnel issues, Brian Olsavsky also said that Amazon will continue to be "cautious" in terms of investment.

Despite its cautious investment, Amazon is optimistic about the outlook for the first quarter of this year. The company expects revenue in the first quarter of 2024 to be between $8 billion and $12 billion, and sales to be between $138 billion and $143.5 billion.

Amazon

Performance

Layoffs