Amazon’s Q3 2025 results boosted by AWS cloud business
By Associated Press | Published: 2025-10-31 13:17:00 | Source: Fast Company – technology
Amazon reported higher fiscal profits and sales in the third quarter than a year ago, helped by accelerating growth in its cloud computing business and strong spending by its customers looking for lower prices at a time of rising inflation.
The results, announced Thursday, exceeded Wall Street expectations. The company’s prominent cloud computing arm also beat analyst expectations, rising 20%. But Amazon issued a cautious sales forecast for the fiscal fourth quarter.
However, shares rose nearly 13% in after-hours trading.
Analysts are analyzing Amazon’s results, along with other retailers’ earnings performance, to gain insight into how shoppers are spending ahead of the holiday season and how the online giant is managing cost increases from President Donald Trump’s tariffs.
But Seattle-based Amazon is also under pressure to boost confidence among investors that its computing arm, Amazon Web Services, is no less powerful than Microsoft’s Azure platform and Google’s Google Cloud platform. Amazon posted better-than-expected 20% growth for AWS, after 17.5% growth in its fiscal second quarter. Andy Jassy, Amazon’s president and CEO, noted in a statement that AWS is growing at a pace not seen since 2022.
Amazon last week experienced a major AWS outage after an issue disrupted internet use around the world for most of the day, disrupting a wide range of online services, including social media, gaming, food delivery, live streaming and financial platforms.
Jassy also noted that Amazon is seeing strong momentum and growth across Amazon as AI drives “meaningful improvements in every corner of our business.”
Jassy also noted that in stores, Amazon continues to realize the benefits of innovation in its fulfillment network, and is on track to deliver Prime members at full speeds again this year, expanding same-day delivery of perishable groceries to more than 2,300 communities by the end of the year, and doubling the number of rural communities with access to Amazon’s same-day and next-day delivery service.
Amazon is rapidly automating its warehouses, raising big questions about how many workers it will need in the future.
In fact, Amazon announced on Tuesday that it would cut about 14,000 jobs at the company while increasing spending on artificial intelligence and cutting costs elsewhere. Teams and individuals affected were notified of the job cuts on Tuesday. Amazon has about 350,000 corporate employees and the total workforce is about 1.56 million. The cuts amount to a roughly 4% reduction in the companies’ workforce.
Jassy told analysts that the job cuts announcement wasn’t “really financially driven and wasn’t really AI driven.”
“It’s the culture,” he said. “And if you grow as quickly as we have for several years, the size of the business, the number of people, the number of locations, the types of businesses you’re in, you end up with a lot more people than you had before, and you end up with a lot more layers.”
Late last month, Amazon unveiled a new robotic system — being tested in South Carolina — for its warehouses that coordinates multiple arms to perform picking, stocking and consolidation tasks simultaneously. The company said that this technology works to integrate three assembly lines into one line.
Amazon is also testing an AI agent that helps human managers deploy workers and avoid bottlenecks. The company said the system allows operators to spend less time analyzing dashboards and more time training teams, creating safer work environments.
Amazon’s strategies appear to be fueling its latest results.
Amazon reported net income of $21.12 billion, or $1.95 per share, for the quarter ended September 30. That’s up from $15.33 billion, or $1.43 per share, a year ago.
Analysts were expecting $1.57 per share during the quarter, according to FactSet.
Amazon’s sales rose to $180.2 billion, compared to $158.88 billion in the same period last year.
Analysts had expected $177.91 billion, according to FactSet.
The company said that the number of items sold by Amazon recently increased by 11%.
In late July, Jassy touted more than 2 million sellers on its third-party marketplace, each with different strategies on whether to pass on higher costs to shoppers. He also told analysts that he saw “neither a decline in demand nor a significant rise in prices.”
Amazon said it expects fiscal fourth-quarter sales to range between $206 billion and $213 billion.
-Anne DiNocenzio, AP Business Writer
(tags for translation) Amazon
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