The Amazon 2017 full results have been released and give a striking picture of the size, growth and potential of the company in 2018.
In the fourth quarter of 2017, net sales increased 38% to $60.5 billion, compared with $43.7 billion in the fourth quarter of 2016. Excluding the $1.1 billion favorable impact from year-over-year changes in foreign exchange rates throughout the quarter, net sales increased 36% compared with fourth quarter 2016, which is fairly astonishing growth.
For the full year, net sales increased 31% to $177.9 billion, compared with $136.0 billion in 2016. Excluding the $210 million favorable impact from year-over-year changes in foreign exchange rates throughout the year, net sales increased 31% compared with 2016. So on foreign exchange changes, they did pretty well. Operating income decreased 2% to $4.1 billion, compared with operating income of $4.2 billion in 2016. Net income was $3.0 billion. You can find more detail here.
In the report Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos pulls out Alexa as one of the highlights of the year: “Our 2017 projections for Alexa were very optimistic, and we far exceeded them. We don’t see positive surprises of this magnitude very often — expect us to double down. We’ve reached an important point where other companies and developers are accelerating adoption of Alexa. There are now over 30,000 skills from outside developers, customers can control more than 4,000 smart home devices from 1,200 unique brands with Alexa, and we’re seeing strong response to our new far-field voice kit for manufacturers. Much more to come and a huge thank you to our customers and partners.”
And there are many other notable results for Amazon 2017. Amazon Go, the checkoutless store, opened up its first store in Seattle. Amazon launched a dedicated marketplace in Australia and Prime launched in the Netherlands, Luxembourg and Singapore. In terms of people, Amazon hired nearly 130,000 employees globally in 2017. And in 2017, more than five billion items were shipped with Prime across the globe and more new paid members joined Prime in 2017 than any previous year.
