Amazon reported strong Q4 2018 revenues in all parts of its business on Thursday afternoon. Its cloud services business grew 45% over the last quarter of 2017. The only negative in the report was a lower-than-expected guidance number for the March-ending quarter.
Here are the top lines:
- Total Q4 revenue. $72.4 billion.
- Total 2018 revenue. $232.9 billion (crossed the $200 billion threshold for the first time).
- AWS revenue. $7.43 billion.
- Echo devices. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said his company's smart speaker business had a big holiday quarter. "Alexa was very busy during her holiday season. Echo Dot was the best-selling item across all products on Amazon globally, and customers purchased millions more devices from the Echo family compared to last year," he said in a statement.
- Q1 forecast. Revenue between $56 billion and $60 billion. Amazon says its revenues will be hindered somewhat by the strong U.S. dollar.
- Stock. Jumped 3% in after-hours trading on the earnings report.
- Market capitalization. Grew to $840 billion Thursday afternoon, more than Microsoft, Apple, or any other publicly traded company.
