Amazon recorded its highest working revenue in its historical past within the vacation quarter of 2023, buoyed by income development throughout all its main enterprise strains and a yr of heavy cost-cutting underneath the course of CEO Andy Jassy.
The corporate introduced on Thursday that its working earnings – or revenue from its core enterprise operations that excludes sure objects like investments in different corporations and curiosity bills – grew 383% yr over yr to $13.2 billion within the fourth quarter of 2023, marking the second straight quarter by which Amazon has achieved its highest working revenue ever.
The document income come as Jassy, who took over for Amazon founder Jeff Bezos in 2021, continues to place his personal stamp on the tech big, partially by means of heavy job cuts.
Amazon beforehand introduced 27,000 company layoffs, which started in 2022 and continued into 2023, marking the biggest company layoff within the tech big’s historical past. Then, earlier this yr, Amazon introduced a whole bunch of job cuts throughout its gaming and video divisions. Going ahead, Amazon isn’t opposed to creating extra job cuts both, Amazon chief monetary officer Brian Olsavsky mentioned in a name with reporters on Thursday.
Amazon will “proceed to watch out on what we put money into, proceed to put money into new issues and new areas…[but] the place we are able to discover efficiencies and do extra with much less, we’re going to try this as nicely.”
Amazon, underneath Jassy, is boosting its backside line by means of different means as nicely. Income development inside Amazon’s two most worthwhile divisions – Amazon Net Providers and Amazon’s large promoting enterprise – accelerated within the fourth quarter, and Olsavsky mentioned the corporate expects that acceleration to proceed in AWS into 2024.
Whereas Amazon declined to say how a lot of AWS’ development is coming from a surge of company curiosity in generative AI apps and providers, Jassy advised Wall Road analysts that he expects the world to provide tens of billions of {dollars} in income within the coming years.
The document working revenue was only one spotlight from a blockbuster fourth-quarter earnings report that despatched Amazon shares up greater than 8% in after-hours buying and selling. Income from Amazon’s on-line retail enterprise in North America grew 8% excluding foreign money fluctuations, marking the quickest development for that section in 5 quarters. Executives mentioned the huge e-commerce enterprise benefited from expanded vacation promotions and elevated supply speeds that efficiently attracted many last-minute vacation customers.
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