After posting yet another strong quarter that has made Wall Street analysts and investors weak in the knees, Amazon’s stock raced past its all-time high on Friday, rocketing up 13 percent on bigger-than-expected sales and the prospect of a mammoth holiday season.
Shares of Amazon flew past $1,100 for the first time ever in early morning trading, after the internet e-commerce monolith bested revenue expectations by more than $1.5 billion for the third quarter — raking in $43.74 billion during what is usually a “down” period for the company as it ramps up to end the year.
The Seattle-based company continues to find ways to funnel money back into its ecosystem. CEO Jeff Bezos noted the company had increased customers on Alexa-enabled devices “5x” in the last year. Amazon’s voice control system makes it increasingly easy for customers to buy its products — something that’ll pay dividends after Amazon closed its nearly $14 billion buyout of Whole Foods last quarter. Ordering organic beat juice and having it Amazon-droned to your apartment is apparently the way of the future.
Another reason Amazon continues to dominate? Its data. The more the company knows about its customers, the easier it is to keep them in the fold — and keep them forking over the dough. Even the black sheep member of the Amazon family helps the cause here: On the company’s quarterly call on Thursday, CFO Brian Olsavsky pointed to the strength of its video business in continuing to grow Amazon Prime.
“The video business is having great results with our most important customer base, our Prime customers,” said Olsavsky. “We have a lot of data. We see viewing patters and sales patterns. We can see which video resonates with Prime members, and which doesn’t. We’re always looking for more impactful shows, more shows that resonate with our customer base and what they want to see.”
As its cloud service business has started to plateau, investors will continue to look for the company to boost its revenue from other avenues. With its fourth straight growth quarter, and the company projecting it’ll make a 28 to 38 percent jump during the fourth quarter in comparison to last year, Amazon has Wall Street convinced it can keep pulling rabbits out of its hat.
And if for some reason your name isn’t Jeff Bezos and you’re still worried about where he ranks in the “world’s richest person” hierarchy, today was a good day. The 53-year-old exec has added a cool $7 billion to his Schwab account in the last 24 hours, pushing him back to the top of the billionaire food chain with a whopping $90 billion net worth. That’ll buy you a grip of organic hummus.