Amazon net income soars in Q1

Seattle – Amazon.com’s net income soared 32% during the first quarter of fiscal 2014, climbing to $108 million from $82 million the same quarter a year earlier. Net sales increased 23% to $19.74 billion in the first quarter, compared with $16.07 billion in first quarter 2013.



Amazon credited the release of numerous new services during the quarter as helping to drive its impressive performance. These include Fire TV, a box that plugs into HDTV for access to a wide variety of digital content, and associated developer tools; Prime Instant Video for the U.K. and Germany; Prime Pantry, a new service available only to Prime members offering exclusive access to low-priced everyday items; the Amazon Dash mobile home shopping device; Flow, a new way to search for items on its iPhone app; and expanded categories for its online stores.



Looking ahead, in the second quarter of fiscal 2014, net sales are expected to be between $18.1 billion and $19.8 billion, or to grow between 15% and 26% compared with second quarter 2013.



“We get our energy from inventing on behalf of customers, and 2014 is off to a kinetic start,” said Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com. “Our device team launched Fire TV, offering great content, including our recently announced exclusive deal with HBO, and innovative features like unified voice search, which we’re delighted is being adopted by so many new partners, including Netflix, HBO Go, Hulu Plus, Crackle and Showtime Anytime. The team is working hard to keep Fire TV in stock. Our retail team launched Prime Pantry, a new option available only to Prime members offering exclusive access to everyday essentials in non-bulk sizes — ranging from breakfast foods and popular soft drinks, to cleaning and personal care items. And, our AWS team significantly lowered prices on EC2, S3 and RDS, saving AWS customers hundreds of millions of dollars over the next several months alone.”