- Amazon recently announced its earnings for the quarter and revealed that it now has 150 million Prime members. Here are some of the other metrics that you should know.
Amazon recently announced its earnings for the quarter and one of the biggest bullet points in the news is that the online retail giant now has 150 million Prime members. This is a significant increase from the 100 million users the company announced in 2018. Amazon charges $119 per year or $12.99 per month for the service.
In the earnings report, Amazon also reported that its operating cash flow increased 25% to $38.5 billion for the trailing 12 months compared to $30.7 billion for the trailing 12 months ended December 31, 2018. And free cash flow increased to $25.8 billion for the trailing 12 months compared to $19.4 billion for the trailing 12 months ended December 31, 2018.
And in the fourth quarter of 2019, net sales increased to $87.4 billion compared to $72.4 billion in Q4 2018. And for the full year 2019, net sales increased 20% to $280.5 billion compared to $232.9 billion in 2018.
“Prime membership continues to get better for customers year after year. And customers are responding — more people joined Prime this quarter than ever before, and we now have over 150 million paid Prime members around the world,” said Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos. “We’ve made Prime delivery faster — the number of items delivered to U.S. customers with Prime’s free one-day and same-day delivery more than quadrupled this quarter compared to last year. Members now have free two-hour grocery delivery from Amazon Fresh and Whole Foods Market in more than 2,000 U.S. cities and towns. Prime members watched double the hours of original movies and TV shows on Prime Video this quarter compared to last year, and Amazon Originals received a record 88 nominations and 26 wins at major awards shows. A huge thank you to teams across Amazon for their dedicated work to build, innovate, and deliver for customers this holiday.”
During Amazon’s holiday season, customers ordered billions of items worldwide, including tens of millions of Amazon devices. And the best-selling devices this holiday season were Echo Dot, Fire TV Stick with Alexa Voice Remote, and Echo Show 5. Now Fire TV has over 40 million active users worldwide. And Prime Video received eight Golden Globe Award nominations with Fleabag winning the Best Television Series, Musical or Comedy, and Best Performance by an Actress in a Television Series, Musical or Comedy for Phoebe Waller-Bridge.
Amazon also revealed that the company created over 700,000 direct and indirect jobs in India since launching amazon.in in 2013. And in January, Amazon announced plans to create 1 million jobs in India by 2025 with continued investments in technology, infrastructure, and logistics. Since 2014, Amazon grew its employee based over four times and inaugurated its new campus building in Hyderabad — which is Amazon’s first fully-owned campus outside the U.S. and the largest building globally in terms of employees and space.
Last year, authors earned over $300 million from the Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) Select Global Fund, totaling over $1.1 billion since the launch of Kindle Unlimited. Plus millions of independent authors have self-published millions of books through KDP since launching the service in 2006.
During the earnings call, Amazon chief financial officer Brian Olsavsky said that the investment costs for one-day shipping was slightly lower than the $1.5 billion than what was expected in the fourth quarter. And he predicted that the costs will hit $1 billion in the first quarter. And Olsavsky said that the company is getting “more efficient as we go.”
“AWS sales grew over $2.5 billion for the quarter, which is larger than the overall annual size of most cloud company’s revenue,” explained Moor Insights and Strategy founder Patrick Moorhead via CNET.
