In the second quarter ended June 30, net sales at Amazon rose 10.1%, to $148 billion, and net income doubled to $13.5 billion. North America sales rose 9.1%, to $90 billion, while international sales rose 6.6%, to $31.7 billion. Sales at AWS, Amazon's cloud division, rose 18.7%, to $26.3 billion.
Excluding AWS, results were below analysts' expectations, leading to a drop in Amazon stock price in after-hours trading, almost 5%, to $175 a share.
The company predicts that third-quarter sales will grow 8%-11%, to between $154 billion and $158.5 billion, a range that many analysts also found disappointing.
Amazon president and CEO Andy Jassy commented: "We're continuing to make progress on a number of dimensions, but perhaps none more so than the continued reacceleration in AWS growth. As companies continue to modernize their infrastructure and move to the cloud, while also leveraging new Generative AI opportunities, AWS continues to be customers' top choice as we have much broader functionality, superior security and operational performance, a larger partner ecosystem, and AI capabilities."
In a conference call after the results were announced, Amazon CFO Brian Olsavsky said that current events, including the Olympics, the presidential election, and "the assassination attempt a couple weeks ago," have claimed people's attention and make the third quarter "tough" to forecast, according to the New York Times. Focusing on the news sometimes leads customers, who are tending to seek lower-cost products, to "skip purchases entirely."
And the Wall Street Journal observed, "Like many of the top companies in technology, Amazon has been ramping up its spending on the data centers, real estate and chips needed to meet the surging demand for computer power that has come with the rise of artificial intelligence. Amazon's purchases of property and equipment, a measurement of its capital spending, was $17.62 billion in the second quarter. That is more than 50% higher than the year-earlier level and the highest quarterly spending since 2021." This heavy spending will continue.