Amazon Q1 revenues up 23pc to US$19.7bn

25 Apr 2014

Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon

E-commerce giant Amazon reported first-quarter revenues of US$19.7bn, up 23pc on last year. During the quarter, the company launched its Fire TV product and struck an exclusive content deal with HBO.

The company reported a profit of US$108m for the quarter, up from US$82m last year.

“We get our energy from inventing on behalf of customers, and 2014 is off to a kinetic start,” said Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.

“Our device team launched Fire TV, offering great content, including our recently announced exclusive deal with HBO, and innovative features like unified voice search, which we’re delighted is being adopted by so many new partners, including Netflix, HBO Go, Hulu Plus, Crackle and Showtime Anytime. The team is working hard to keep Fire TV in stock.

“Our retail team launched Prime Pantry, a new option available only to Prime members offering exclusive access to everyday essentials in non-bulk sizes – ranging from breakfast foods and popular soft drinks, to cleaning and personal care items.

“And, our AWS (Amazon Web Services) team significantly lowered prices on EC2, S3 and RDS, saving AWS customers hundreds of millions of dollars over the next several months alone,” Bezos said.

During the quarter, Amazon decided to shake up the streaming-video market with its Fire TV device in a move that will see it compete aggressively against Apple and Google and bring its vast library of 200,000 TV shows and movie content directly to the living room to rent or buy.

The device also marks Amazon’s foray into console-style gaming with Sev Zero, Amazon’s first game built from the ground-up for Fire TV.

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John Kennedy is a journalist who served as editor of Silicon Republic for 17 years

editorial@siliconrepublic.com