Amazon posts record profits as coronavirus keeps shoppers glued

Amazon reported it’s biggest profit in history on blowout sales Thursday as the coronavirus kept shoppers turning to their phones to buy everything from diapers to groceries.

The Seattle-based e-tailing giant — whose billionaire boss, Jeff Bezos, was just grilled about the company’s competitive practices on Capitol Hill on Wednesday — posted third-quarter earnings of $10.30 a share, shattering Wall Street’s expectations for just $1.46 a share.

Amazon’s revenue clocked in at $88.9 billion, beating forecasts of $81.2 billion amid 40-percent year-over-year sales growth.

The shopping titan’s sales now make up roughly half of all online retail sales, according to Statista, which in turn make up 14 percent of all retail sales in the US, according to recently-released data from the Department of Commerce.

Amazon shares in after-hours trading jumped 5.5 percent to $3,219.79, adding roughly $8 billion to Bezos’ net worth, which was $182 billion at Thursday’s close.

For Bezos, already the world’s richest man, to become the first person with a net worth of $200 billion, Amazon’s stock would need to climb just over $3,400.

“This was another highly unusual quarter, and I couldn’t be more proud of and grateful to our employees around the globe,” Bezos said in a statement, adding that Amazon has created “over 175,000 new jobs since March” and is working to turn 125,000 of the workers into full-time employees.

Amazon has been a major beneficiary of the pandemic, which has Americans increasingly shunning brick-and-mortar stores in favor of home delivery. But the coronavirus has also resulted in ballooning expenses as it tries to keep up with the boom, including through a wave of hiring.

The Seattle company’s workforce now exceeds 1 million, making it the nation’s second-largest employer behind Walmart Inc.

The Seattle tech giant stunned Wall Street last quarter when it announced a record $4 billion in coronavirus-related costs. In addition to the hiring spree, those investments have included personal protective equipment for its hundreds of thousands of employees, “enhanced cleaning” of its facilities, higher wages for hourly workers as well as “hundreds of millions” of dollars to develop its coronavirus testing capabilities.

The company forecasted revenue between $87 billion and $93 billion next quarter, beating the Street’s expectations of $86.5 billion. It also said it expects to spend an extra $2 billion on coronavirus-related expenses.

The company’s Amazon Web Services cloud computing business missed forecasts, however, bringing in $10.8 billion in revenue versus the predicted $11 billion, representing year-over-year growth of 29 percent.