Late last week, Amazon released its Q3 2024 earnings report. Below you will find some of the highlights.
We’ll start here: The year-over-year growth in Amazon’s on-line store sales was again 7% in Q4 versus 2023, rising to $75.5 billion. 7% is at the upper end of this metric for Amazon over the past couple of years.
Overall, and working off a very large number, net sales increased 10% to $187.7 billion.
As a note, Amazon’s on-line stores sales of $75.5 billion in Q4 were 40.2% of the total, up a bit from Q3.
It was also a profitable quarter, with Amazon’s net income increasing to $20.0 billion compared with $13.2 billion the prior year, for a rise of 51.5%.
Operating income was also way up, reaching $21.1 billion in Q4 versus $11.2 billion in 2023.
For the full year of 2024, net sales increased 11% to $638.0 billion in 2024, compared with $574.8 billion in 2023.
Profits were also way up, reaching $59.2% in 2024, up 94.7% versus $30.4% in 2023, or a strong 10.2% of 2024 sales.
Fulfillment costs increased 7.3% to $27.9 billion in Q4. Those include the cost of workers needed to run its fulfillment centers, sortation centers and other logistics facilities. Also under fulfillment costs are any lease payments for these buildings, or depreciation costs if Amazon owns the facility. Some inbound logistics costs are also included. They don’t include shipping costs.
For all of 2024, fulfillment costs rose 8.7% to $98.5 billion.
It’s worth noting that the 7.3% gain in fulfillment costs in the quarter was about equal to the 7% growth in on-line store sales, and with fulfillment costs not including shipping costs. That breaks a long-time pattern of Amazon’s fulfillment costs growing much faster than on-line sales.
Shipping costs were a whopping $28.5 billion in the Q4, but up just 4.0% versus previous year. For a change, this 7.0% increase was below the 7% rise in ecommerce revenue. Note this is not net expense, meaning it is not offset by Prime membership fees or any paid shipping, numbers which the company used to provide but no longer does.
Fulfillment costs were thus 36.9% of on-line store sales ($75.5 billion), while shipping costs represented 37.7%. Together, fulfillment and shipping were therefore 75.7% of ecommerce revenue, again excluding shipping revenue, and trending down a bit but still a huge share.
(See More Below)
|
CATEGORY SPONSOR: SOFTEON |
|
|
| |
| |
|
|
Also worth noting is the fact that services revenue, such as its Marketplace, Fulfillment by Amazon, and AWS businesses, increasingly exceed product sales.
In Q4, services were 56.2% of total Amazon sales, a number that continues to increase, up from 54.8% in 2023.
For the full year, services represented 57.3% of the $637.9 in total revenue.
Amazon’s AWS web services segment sales increased 19% year-over-year in Q4 to $28.7 billion.
Any reaction to Amazon's Q4 results? Let us know your thoughts at the Feedback section below.
|
