Amazon worth more than Walmart — e-commerce giant reports US$23bn Q2

24 Jul 2015

The new world meets the old world as online retail giant Amazon soared past offline giant Walmart after reporting US$23bn in Q2 sales.

E-commerce and cloud giant Amazon is now the king of retail in the US, having zoomed past Walmart in value in after-hours trading after reporting a US$23bn second quarter with sales up 20pc.

Amazon reported a profit of US$92m compared with a loss of US$126m a year ago.

During after-hours trading, Amazon’s stock value jumped 14pc to US$550 per share, which added US$30bn to Amazon’s market value.

This valued Amazon at US$250bn, well past Walmart’s US$230bn valuation.

Amazon, which employs more than 1,400 people in Ireland, may be planning a significant expansion of its data centre footprint in Ireland where it already has seven data centres, having acquired the former Jacobs Biscuits manufacturing site in Tallaght.

Amazon is on Fire

During the quarter, Amazon increased Prime free same-day delivery to 500 metro areas, delivering up to 1m items a day.

Prime Now, its one-hour delivery service, has been expanded to nine cities, including London.

Amazon Echo – the first device designed around e-commerce enabling your voice, is now generally available in the US. Amazon also announced the Alexa Fund — named for Alexa, the cloud-based voice service that powers Echo — which will invest up to $100 million to support developers, manufacturers and start-ups of all sizes to create new experiences designed around the human voice.

Amazon’s Fire TV, a rival to the Apple TV, now offers nearly 2,000 channels, apps and games.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced that it will open a new region in India in 2016, which will enable customers to run workloads in India and serve Indian end-users with even better latency.

AWS announced that the EU (Frankfurt) region, which opened in October 2014, is AWS’ fastest-growing international region to date.

“The teams at Amazon have been working hard for customers,” said Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com.

“We unveiled Amazon Business, opened Amazon Mexico, launched Prime free same-day, rolled out our ninth Prime Now city, broke our Black Friday record with the first-ever Prime Day, received 11 Emmy nominations for Transparent, debuted six new kids pilots, brought Echo to general availability, introduced the Alexa Skills Kit and Alexa Voice Service, opened FBA Small and Light, continued to double down on our fastest-growing geography — India — launched 350 significant AWS features and services so far this year (ahead of last year’s pace), introduced AWS Educate, and entered into agreements for new solar and wind farms — enough to exceed our 2016 goal of 40pc renewable energy.”

Amazon image via Shutterstock

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

editorial@siliconrepublic.com