is-amazon-profitable

Is Amazon Profitable? Amazon Profitability 1994-2023

Amazon was profitable in 2023. On nearly $575 billion in revenue for 2023, Amazon generated a net profit of over $30 billion. Since 2014, Amazon hasn’t recorded a net loss, but it did record a net loss of over $2.7 billion in 2022, while it recouped that in 2023.  Indeed, in 2014, Amazon reported a net loss of $241 million, and it would be profitable until 2021. In 2022, Amazon turned unprofitable again and highly profitable again in 2023. 

amazon-revenue-model
Amazon generated over half a trillion dollars in revenue in 2023, of which $231.87B from online stores, over $140.05B from third-party seller services, $90.76B from AWS, $46.9B from advertising, $40.21B from subscription services, $20.03B billion in physical stores, and $4.96B from other sources.

Amazon aggressive growth

Since its inception, Amazon has been aggressively focusing on growth.

While it managed to survive the dot-com bubble Amazon also hat to tweak its business playbook throughout those years:

amazon-financials-1997-2001

Source: Financials

Amazon’s business model today has several moving parts:

Below you can appreciate the Amazon business model in full:

amazon-business-model
Amazon has a diversified business model. In 2022 Amazon posted over $514 billion in revenues, while it posted a net loss of over $2.7 billion. Online stores contributed almost 43% of Amazon revenues. The remaining was generated by Third-party Seller Services, and Physical Stores. While  Amazon AWS, Subscription Services, and Advertising revenues play a significant role within Amazon as fast-growing segments.

As of 2021, Amazon AWS is a major contributor to Amazon’s operating and net income.

That is because AWS has different unit economics logic:

Amazon AWS follows a platform business model that gains traction by tapping into network effects.

Born as an infrastructure built on Amazon’s infrastructure, AWS has become a company offering cloud services to thousands of clients from the enterprise level to startups.

And its marketplace enables companies to connect to other service providers to build integrated solutions for their organizations.

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