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Amazon has recovered from last year’s net losses – though AWS income has dropped – while Intel’s revenue fell by 36pc.
Amazon had a positive start to 2023 after its disappointing results last year, with a quarterly surge in both revenue and profit.
The tech giant’s revenue has grown 9pc year-on-year to $127.4bn, compared to last year’s $116.4bn. Amazon said this growth would have been 11pc if you excluded the unfavourable impact from “changes in foreign exchange rates”.
The biggest improvement is in quarterly profit, with Amazon’s net income rising to $3.2bn compared to the $3.8bn net loss it suffered at the start of 2022.
The 2022 loss marked Amazon’s first quarterly loss since 2015 and was attributed to rising operating costs and the company’s common stock investment in EV start-up Rivian Automotive, which had a pre-tax valuation loss of $7.6bn last April.
In recent months, Amazon has been making efforts to costs and improve its efficiency. In March, Amazon revealed plans to let go of 9,000 employees on top of the 18,000 it laid off in January.
The company’s total full-time and part-time staff has fallen by 10pc to 1.465m, compared to 1.62m employees in Q1 of last year.
“There’s a lot to like about how our teams are delivering for customers, particularly amidst an uncertain economy,” said Amazon CEO Andy Jassy.
“Our advertising business continues to deliver robust growth, largely due to our ongoing machine learning investments that help customers see relevant information when they engage with us, which in turn delivers unusually strong results for brands.”
Amazon’s cloud computing arm, Amazon Web Services (AWS), has reported a drop in its net income, as operating expenses have risen faster than revenue growth.
This division’s net income was $5.1bn for the first quarter of 2023, a drop of more than 21pc when compared to Q1 last year. This contrasts to competitor Google Cloud, which recently reported its first profitable quarter.
Intel income falls
Meanwhile, Intel’s revenue has taken a significant hit this year, with reports that the company has had its worst ever quarterly loss.
The company’s revenue for the first quarter of 2023 was $11.7bn, a drop of 36pc compared to last year’s $18.4bn. Net income plummeted by 134pc, resulting in a quarterly loss of $2.8bn compared to last year’s profit of $8.1bn.
Intel had given warnings about a bleak start to 2023 in January, when the company revealed its 2022 results. In a January earnings call, CEO Pat Gelsinger said Intel had “stumbled” and “lost momentum”, but believed the company will stabilise in 2023.
Last October, Intel said it was planning to “aggressively” address costs for 2023, with a goal of reaching $3bn in cost reductions.
In response to the latest results, Gilsinger said Intel was making “steady progress with our transformation”.
“We hit key execution milestones in our data centre roadmap and demonstrated the health of the process technology underpinning it,” Gilsinger said.
“While we remain cautious on the macroeconomic outlook, we are focused on what we can control as we deliver on IDM 2.0: driving consistent execution across process and product roadmaps and advancing our foundry business to best position us to capitalise on the $1trn market opportunity ahead.”
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