Last week, Amazon released its Q1 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 7% in Q1 versus 2023. That continues solid growth in the metric in the last few quarters at Amazon after a year of flat or even slight declines in that measure.
That had caused a number of observers to wonder if ecommerce had reached a plateau.
Overall, and working off a very large number, net sales increased 13% to $143.3 billion in the first quarter, compared with $127.4 billion in first quarter 2023.
Strong growth was seen in all three of Amazon’s main business units, but as usual, its AWS web services unit lead the way, up 17% to $25 billion. North American sales rose 12% to $86.3 billion, while international revenue was up 10% to $31.9 billion.
It was also a pretty profitable quarter, with net income up to $10.4 billion in the first quarter, compared with $3.2 billion in Q1 2023, for a 225% gain.
That gave Amazon net income of a solid 7.2% of net revenue.
Operating income was also way up, increasing to $15.3 billion in the first quarter, compared with $4.8 billion in first quarter 2023.
Also solid: Operating cash flow increased 82% to $99.1 billion for the trailing twelve months, compared with $54.3 billion for the trailing twelve months ended March 31, 2023.
Fulfillment costs increased to $22.3 billion in Q1. Those include the cost of workers need to run its fulfillment centers, sortation centers and other logistics facilities. Also under fulfillment costs are any lease payments for these building, or depreciation costs if Amazon owns the facility. Some inbound logistics costs are also included.
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 It’s worth noting that the 6.6% gain in fulfillment costs was - for a change - about equal to on-line store sales growth. Usually it is significantly higher.
Fulfillment costs were a steep 40.8% of on-line store sales.
Separately, shipping costs were $21.8 billion, up from $19.9 billion or 9.5% in Q1 2023, above the 7% in on-line sales growth. Shipping costs represented 39.9% of on-line sales.
Also worth noting is the fact that services revenue, such as Amazon’s Marketplace services, Fulfillment by Amazon logistics services, and AWS businesses, increasingly exceed product sales.
In Q1, services were 57.4% of total Amazon sales, versus 55.5% in Q1 2023.
All told a solid quarter for Amazon.
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