Amazon beats expectations with eighth straight quarterly profit

Riding on the back of its steadily growing online retail and cloud business, Amazon posted its eighth straight quarterly profit beating Wall Street expectation.

In the first quarter ended March’17, Amazon posted revenues of $35.71 billion with an earning of $1.48 per share. Whereas, Wall Street was expecting an earning of $1.12 per share and revenues of $35.31 billion. The revenue grew 23 percent on a year-on-year basis, compared to $29.1 billion in the first quarter 2016.

Amazon's operating cash flow increased 53 percent to $17.6 billion for the past twelve months, as compared to $11.6 billion for the 12 months until March 31, 2016. The income stood at $724 million, whereas the free cash flow increased to $10.2 billion.

However, operating income declined 6 percent to $1.0 billion in this quarter, compared to $1.1 billion in the same quarter previous year. Investors had been hoping to see operating margin expansion in North America.

Amazon made special note of its accomplishments abroad, particularly in India. In his announcement, CEO Jeff Bezos noted that India is one of the most significant markets for the company as it holds immense potential and opportunity for growth. “Our India team is moving fast and delivering for customers and sellers. The team has increased Prime selection by 75 percent since launching the program nine months ago, increased fulfillment capacity for sellers by 26 percent already this year, announced 18 Indian Original TV series, and just last week introduced a Fire TV Stick optimized for Indian customers with integrated voice search in English and Hindi,” he said.

Meanwhile, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is drawing more enterprises to its cloud platform. AWS sales increased 42 percent to $3.66 billion, as compared to $2.6 billion for the same quarter in the previous year.

Amazon's net sales in North America, its biggest market, jumped 23.5 percent to $20.99 billion in the latest quarter.

The company's stock was up more than 3 percent in after-hours trading.