SEATTLE -- Amazon.com, Inc. today announced financial results for its second quarter ended June 30, 2018.
Operating cash flow increased 22% to $21.8 billion for the trailing twelve months, compared with $17.8 billion for the trailing twelve months ended June 30, 2017. Free cash flow increased to $10.4 billion for the trailing twelve months, compared with $9.6 billion for the trailing twelve months ended June 30, 2017. Free cash flow less lease principal repayments decreased to $4.1 billion for the trailing twelve months, compared with $5.4 billion for the trailing twelve months ended June 30, 2017. Free cash flow less finance lease principal repayments and assets acquired under capital leases decreased to $546 million for the trailing twelve months, compared with $1.4 billion for the trailing twelve months ended June 30, 2017.
Common shares outstanding plus shares underlying stock-based awards totaled 506 million on June 30, 2018, compared with 502 million one year ago.
Net sales increased 39% to $52.9 billion in the second quarter, compared with $38.0 billion in second quarter 2017. Excluding the $760 million favorable impact from year-over-year changes in foreign exchange rates throughout the quarter, net sales increased 37% compared with second quarter 2017.
Operating income increased to $3.0 billion in the second quarter, compared with operating income of $628 million in second quarter 2017.
Net income increased to $2.5 billion in the second quarter, or $5.07 per diluted share, compared with net income of $197 million, or $0.40 per diluted share, in second quarter 2017.
“We want customers to be able to use Alexa wherever they are,” said Jeff Bezos, Amazon founder and CEO. “There are now tens of thousands of developers across more than 150 countries building new devices using the Alexa Voice Service, and the number of Alexa-enabled devices has more than tripled in the past year. Our partners are creating a wide variety of new Alexa-enabled devices and experiences, including soundbars from Polk and Sonos; headphones from Jabra; smart home devices from ecobee and First Alert; Windows 10 PCs from Acer, HP, and Lenovo; and cars from automakers including BMW, Ford (F), and Toyota.”
Amazon introduced new machine learning tools for developers to make Alexa skills even more engaging and discoverable, including a feature that allows U.S. customers to launch skills using more natural phrases and requests; the ability for developers to turn text into lifelike speech using Amazon Polly, for free; and the release of the software development kit for Python that allows developers to more easily build Alexa skills. Amazon also expanded the ability for developers to earn money or sell goods and services through their Alexa skills using in-skill purchasing or Amazon Pay.
The Alexa Fund invested in new companies, including Aaptiv, DefinedCrowd, Novel Effect, Tact.ai, and Sensible Object, and kicked off the second round of the Alexa Accelerator powered by Techstars, a program empowering entrepreneurs who are innovating voice technology.
Amazon announced an offering that helps entrepreneurs build their own companies by delivering Amazon packages. Business owners can grow their companies by accessing Amazon’s delivery technology and package volume, as well as receiving discounts on a suite of assets and services such as vehicle leases and comprehensive insurance. Additionally, Amazon committed $1 million to fund startup costs for eligible military veterans to start their own delivery businesses.
Amazon Prime Video received 22 Emmy nominations for its original programming, including 14 nominations for comedy series The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. Prime Video and the National Football League renewed their streaming partnership for Thursday Night Football, which will be available globally during the 2018 and 2019 seasons to over 100 million Prime members. Additionally, Prime Video and the Premier League announced that live and exclusive Premier League football matches will be available in the U.K. beginning in 2019 at no extra cost to Prime members.
The fourth annual Prime Day was Amazon’s biggest global shopping event ever, welcoming more new Prime members on July 16th than any other previous day in Amazon history. Members purchased more than 100 million products, and the best-selling items worldwide were the Fire TV Stick with Alexa Voice Remote and Echo Dot. Small and medium-sized businesses selling on Amazon exceeded $1.5 billion in sales during the Prime Day event. Additionally, Prime members saved millions of dollars at Whole Foods Market with Prime Day deals. Amazon launched Prime member savings at Whole Foods Market stores nationwide, offering Prime members 10% off hundreds of sale items and deep discounts on popular products.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced several new enterprise customers during the quarter: Ryanair and Epic Games have gone all-in on AWS; zulily is moving its infrastructure to AWS to further enhance the online shopping experience for customers; 21st Century Fox chose AWS for the vast majority of its workloads to create a consistent set of digital media capabilities across its brands; Verizon and its subsidiary Oath selected AWS as its preferred public cloud provider; Major League Baseball named AWS its official provider for machine learning, artificial intelligence, and deep learning; and Formula One is moving the vast majority of its infrastructure from on-premises data centers to AWS and standardizing on AWS’s machine learning and data analytics services to accelerate its cloud transformation.
AWS announced the general availability of Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (Amazon EKS), a fully managed service that makes it easy to deploy, manage, and scale containerized applications using Kubernetes on AWS. Amazon EKS removes the complexity of operating Kubernetes clusters with high availability, automatically running the Kubernetes management infrastructure across multiple availability zones to eliminate a single point of failure. Amazon EKS is certified Kubernetes conformant, so customers can run their existing Kubernetes applications without any code changes using existing Kubernetes tooling.
AWS announced the general availability of DeepLens, the world’s first deep learning-enabled wireless video camera built to give developers hands-on experience with machine learning. In addition to built-in sample projects that run on the device, AWS DeepLens customers can also create their own models in Amazon SageMaker — a fully-managed service that enables developers to quickly and easily build, train, and deploy machine learning models. Thousands of DeepLens devices have shipped since becoming generally available in June.
AWS announced the general availability of Amazon Neptune, a fast, reliable, and fully-managed graph database service. With Amazon Neptune, customers can efficiently store and navigate highly-connected data, allowing developers to create sophisticated, interactive graph applications that can query billions of relationships with millisecond latency.
AWS announced pay-per-session pricing for Amazon QuickSight, the first business intelligence service with pay-per-session pricing. Amazon QuickSight is a fast, cloud-powered, business analytics service that makes it easy for all users within an organization to build visualizations, perform ad-hoc analysis, and quickly get business insights from their data, regardless of their technical skill. With pay-per-session pricing, any user can have read-only access to interactive, data driven dashboards in Amazon QuickSight and pay only when they’ve accessed these dashboards, making Amazon QuickSight an even more cost-effective way for customers to make personalized business analytics available to everyone, whether they have tens, hundreds, or thousands of users.
AWS announced a new Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance for AWS Snowball Edge devices (SBE1). AWS Snowball Edge is a 100TB data transfer device with on-board storage and compute that can be used to move large amounts of data into and out of AWS, as a temporary storage tier for large local data sets, or to support independent local workloads in remote locations. Customers can now run compute instances using the same Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) that are used in Amazon EC2 directly on Snowball Edge devices, expanding the range of applications available for collecting and processing data in locations with limited or no network connection such as in certain mining, military, energy, and manufacturing use cases. SBE1 expands upon Snowball Edge’s existing on-board compute and storage capabilities — AWS Greengrass running AWS Lambda functions and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) — to give customers greater choice for operating their edge environments.
AWS announced the general availability of Amazon Sumerian, a new managed service that allows developers to create and publish augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), and 3D applications quickly and easily without requiring any specialized programming or 3D graphics expertise. With Amazon Sumerian, customers can build VR, AR, and 3D experiences for a wide variety of popular hardware systems including mobile devices, head-mounted displays, digital signs, and web browsers.
Third Quarter 2018 Guidance
Net sales are expected to be between $54.0 billion and $57.5 billion, or to grow between 23% and 31% compared with third quarter 2017. This guidance anticipates an unfavorable impact of approximately 30 basis points from foreign exchange rates.
Operating income is expected to be between $1.4 billion and $2.4 billion, compared with $347 million in third quarter 2017.
This guidance assumes, among other things, that no additional business acquisitions, investments, restructuring, or legal settlements are concluded.
Amazon.com Inc. (Nasdaq: AMZN)