Tech: Amazon crushed its earnings (AMZN)

Wall Street is watching for the performance of Amazon's ecommerce division, Prime membership, and AWS cloud business.

Amazon announced its Q1 financial results on Thursday, and it blew by what Wall Street was looking for.

The stock was up about 4% in after-hours trading following the report.

Here were the key numbers:

• Revenue of $35.71 billion, versus Wall Street estimates of $35.3 billion. A nice beat. This compares to $29.1 billion a year ago.
• EPS of $1.48, versus estimates of $1.13 per share, non-GAAP. This compares with non-GAAP EPS of $1.07 per share a year ago. A big beat as well.

Analysts were also closely watching the performance of Amazon's cloud computing unit, Amazon Web Services.

AWS reported $3.66 billion in sales, and 43% growth, which is a beat on the analyst consensus of $3.65 billion in revenue, and 42% growth. Last quarter, AWS didn't grow quite as fast as people expected it would.

Even though it beat predictions, AWS growth still slowed down. In previous three quarters, AWS had experienced 47%, 55%, and 58% growth.

Other key stats include:

• Overall first-quarter sales were up 23%.
• Retail subscription services, which is mostly Amazon Prime (but includes a few other things, like music) hit $1.94 billion, up 49%.

Next quarter, Amazon expects sales to between $35.25 billion and $37.75 billion, or to grow between 16% and 24% compared with second quarter 2016. This factors in $720 million of headwinds from foreign exchange rates, the company says. That's right in line with what the Street is looking for, with analysts expecting $36.84 billion.

Here's the full Amazon press release.

Wall Street is watching for the performance of Amazon's ecommerce division, Prime membership, and AWS cloud business. Read Full Story