Alexa, print money: Even Bezos stunned by Q4 Amazon income

Enlarge / Amazon Go from the outside. (credit: Sam Machkovech)

The fact that Amazon made lots of money in 2017, both in the full year and its fiscal fourth quarter, may not surprise anybody who keeps tabs on the retailer/cloud services provider/video streamer/drone operator.

But the newsworthy thing about its latest quarterly financial report (PDF), released on Thursday, comes from comparing it to a prior earnings report from October 2017: just how bad Amazon was at predicting its bonkers Q4 income.

Amazon's October guidance predicted (PDF) an operating income not exceeding $1.65 billion for Q4 2017-a pretty sky-high estimate, considering that the company reported $1.3 billion of operating income in Q4 2016. But that was nothing. Amazon's Q4 2017 operating income was actually $2.1 billion-a cool 69-percent jump over the same period last year.

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