Amazon earnings beat expectations, shares surge

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Amazon (AMZN) reported its Q4 2019 earnings on Thursday, beating Wall Street’s expectations on both the top and bottom line.

These are the most important numbers from the report, as well as what analysts were expecting as compiled by Bloomberg.

Revenue: $87.4 billion versus $86.17 billion expected

Earnings per share: $6.47 versus $4.11 expected

The stock was up 8% after the announcement, and pushed the company’s market cap over the $1 trillion mark.

Amazon’s report follows what the company called a "record breaking" holiday shopping season. Sales for the quarter were up a whopping 21% compared to Q4 2018.

And of course, Amazon's Amazon Web services (AWS), the engine behind much of the company's stock growth, was a major performer, with sales up 34% year-over-year. Growth over time for AWS, however, continued to tick down, with the business previously seeing 45% year-over-year growth in Q4 2018.

"Our partner checks continue to reflect the relative strength in the AWS platform, though a slower pace in enterprise migrations broadly, high profile competitive wins at both [Google Cloud Platform] and [Microsoft's] Azure, reports of increasing channel conflict, and management turnover have investors concerned that the magnitude of decelerating growth at AWS could continue into 2020," Goldman Sachs’ Heath Terry wrote in an analyst note ahead of Amazon’s earnings.

FILE- In this Sept. 13, 2018, file photo Jeff Bezos, Amazon founder and CEO, speaks at The Economic Club of Washington's Milestone Celebration in Washington. Bezos says the National Enquirer is threatening to publish nude photographs of him unless his private investigators back off the tabloid that detailed the billionaire’s extramarital affair (AP Photo/Cliff Owen, File)
Jeff Bezos, Amazon founder and CEO, speaks at The Economic Club of Washington's Milestone Celebration in Washington. (AP Photo/Cliff Owen, File)

This is the first earnings report since Amazon lost out to Microsoft for the controversial Project JEDI contract. The project, which is meant to bring the department's disparate computer services into a single cloud platform and could net the winner $10 billion, was awarded to Microsoft (MSFT) in October.

Amazon is currently suing over the award, claiming that President Trump interfered in the awarding process, steering the contract toward Microsoft and away from Amazon due to his dislike of Jeff Bezos.

Bezos owns The Washington Post, and Trump has taken issue with the way the paper covers his administration. Amazon believes Trump took out his frustration with the Post's coverage on Amazon, cutting it off from the hefty contract.

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