on Monday said it hit record delivery speeds in the United States in the second-quarter while continuing to cut costs, as investors look for signs of growth in its e-commerce business when it reports its Q2 financials on Thursday.
“There is potential for cloud computing, including Microsoft’s Azure, Google Cloud and AWS, to materially benefit from companies interested in artificial intelligence,” said Tom Forte, a senior research analyst at financial firm D.A. Davidson Companies. Investors are also looking to see how Amazon’s advertising business intersects with more language models and generative AI. The company’s advertising business was seeing “robust growth” due to its machine learning investment, Chief Executive Andy Jassy said in the first-quarter earnings call.
Net sales of Amazon’s advertising business in the first quarter were $9.51-billion. Investors expect the company’s advertising segment will increase to $10.3-billion in the second-quarter, according to estimates from Refinitiv. Doug Herrington, Amazon chief executive of Worldwide Stores, said in a statement on Monday that creating a regional fulfilment network, placing products closer to shoppers and expanding its same-day delivery has reduced costs for consumers and the company.
Amazon’s profit margin was 46.77 per cent in the first-quarter but analysts expected a margin of 46.53 per cent in the second-quarter, according to Refinitiv.