Amazon Is Doing What It Does Best: Making Lots and Lots of MoneyFrom the Echo to Prime to Music, Amazon is raking it in.
ByNicole Lee•
This story originally appeared onEngadget
With thefirst quarterly earnings report of 2018, Amazon showsno sign of slowing down. It reported sales of $51 billion in the past few months, which is an increase of 43 percent from this time last year.
As revealedlast week, Amazon also reported that subscriptions for Amazon Music and Amazon Music Unlimited more than doubled in the past six months. Seeing as streaming music is a big part of the Echo experience, the rise in subscriptions is likely a result of an increase in Echo sales as well. As is typical with the online retail giant, it doesn't usually break down revenue by division. But we do know that of that $51 billion, $32 billion was from product sales, while $19 billion was from the sale of services.
Amazon also continues to see its AWS cloud storage solution as a huge asset, especially since it's grown substantially in the past few months. "AWS lets developers do more and be nimbler, and it continues to get even better every day," said CEO Jeff Bezos in a statement.
这是一个非常积极的公司的前景,especially on the heels of Bezos's mention that Amazon now has over100 million paid Prime subscribersglobally. It's also been busy investing in other areas, like theacquisition of Ring, akid-friendly Alexaand potentially acube-shapedupdate to its Fire TV. It's not afraid of exploring uncharted territory either, such as delivering packagesdirectly to your car.
Still, Amazon hasn't always had it easy. It had tofix an exploitwhere Alexa could listen in and record your private conversations and it's recently faced a barrage of criticism from President Donald Trump for not paying its share of taxes and for putting local retailers out of business.
Update:Amazon has announced that the annual fee forPrimewill go up to $119. It will also renew thedeal it has with the NFLforThursday Night Footballthrough 2019.