Amazon Posts Big Q4 Sales, Net; Jassy Still Optimistic On Grocery

While its retail food gig may not exactly be working for Amazon as it had planned thus far, most other parts of the mega-merchant’s engine seem to be functioning at a high level. The Seattle-based (mostly) online tech-driven firm posted some very impressive numbers in its recently completed fourth quarter and full fiscal 2023.

For its most recent 13-week period ended December 31, Amazon’s net sales jumped 14 percent to $149.2 billion and net earnings increased to $10.6 billion from $0.3 billion a year ago. For its full fiscal year, net revenue rose 12 percent to a whopping $574.8 billion while its net profit was $30.4 billion compared with a net loss of $2.7 billion in 2022.

“This Q4 was a record-breaking holiday shopping season and closed out a robust 2023 for Amazon. While we made meaningful revenue, operating income, and free cash flow progress, what we’re most pleased with is the continued invention and customer experience improvements across our businesses,” said CEO Andy Jassy.

During his call with financial analysts following the earnings release, Jassy made it clear that he’s a long away from giving up on the company’s struggling brick-and-mortar retail food initiative, noting that “he was pleased with the progress we’re making” in retail grocery. “It’s a big business, and it’s continuing to grow at a very healthy clip, and we’re really pleased with that business. And it’s really the way that most mass merchandisers got into the grocery business a few decades ago. If you want to serve as many grocery needs as we do, you have to have a mass physical presence, and that’s what we’ve been trying to do with ‘Fresh’ over several years. We’ve been testing our ‘Fresh’ format in a few locations near Chicago, and a few locations in Southern California. It’s very early, it’s just a few months in, but the results are very promising and on almost every dimension, and so we need to see it for a little bit longer time, but the results appear like we have something that’s resonating and if we continue to see that, then the issue becomes how fast and what’s the best way to expand.”

In other Amazon news, a U.S. federal judge has set October 2026 as the trial date for the FTC’s antitrust lawsuit against company. The federal agency filed its suit against Amazon on September 26, accusing the online retailer of operating an illegal monopoly, in part by fighting efforts by sellers on its online marketplace to offer products more cheaply on other platforms.