With the pandemic still raging, most businesses cannot boast of having as good a year as Amazon.
As families and workers have retreated indoors to stop the coronavirus spreading, internet shopping and the demand for parcels has gone through the roof.
That helped the e-commerce giant deliver a string of blowout quarters in 2020, with analysts expecting the fourth to be no different.
Fuelled by Christmas shopping, Black Friday deals and Amazon’s own Prime Day, Wall Street is predicting that the company smashed through the $100billion revenue mark in the final three months of 2020.
They predict it has raked in £87billion ($119.7billion) over the period – equivalent to an astonishing £650,000 every minute. That would also be up from £63.6billion ($87.4billion) the previous year.
However, Amazon’s profits for the quarter are expected to be almost flat at £2.7billion ($3.7billion) after boss Jeff Bezos vowed to invest more in safety equipment and expanding the company’s infrastructure.
With the rollout of vaccines now under way globally, analysts will be looking for hints of how the company plans to approach life after the pandemic, with at least some of the rise in e-commerce bound to return to physical shops.
The firm’s answer will likely have several prongs, including Amazon’s hugely important cloud computing business, AWS, grocery deliveries and the firm’s new foray into delivering prescription drugs.
The company’s shares have surged by more than 70 per cent in the past 12 months.
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