Amazon is doing well in North America but still struggles overseas,and it says next quarter it could be hurt by foreign exchange rates.
Amazon reported earnings for the third quarter of 2018, showing that its North American business remains solid, boosted by Echo device sales and cloud services. At the same time, it’s still minimizing its losses in international markets.
The one category that Amazon is still fumbling with is international sales, as it slowly develops its smart assistant Alexa to learn more languages and expands its Echo offerings into additional countries. Amazon’s chief financial officer Brian Olsavsky noted that because the Hindu holiday Diwali falls on November this year, the company’s sales associated with that holiday in India weren’t included in this quarter’s numbers, while last year, the holiday fell earlier in the year. “Story’s different country by country obviously, some are more ahead than others,” he said, “But we’re still very pleased with the international business and we’re still seeing good pickup.”
Overall, net income for the company increased more than 10 times year over year to $2.8 billion, a huge jump due to AWS sales, advertising, and services offered to third-party sellers. Revenue is up 29 percent year over year.
Twitter’s financial health has been consistently improving in recent months, benefiting from a push to add more live video and personalized content. The social network’s ad revenue jumped 29% during the quarter to $650 million from $503 million a year earlier. That growth marks the third consecutive quarter of double-digit growth, and Twitter has reported positive net income for four straight quarters. While sales and earnings have grown stronger, Twitter has suffered from a drop in user metrics, especially after purging its ranks to eliminate fake accounts, an effort that continues ahead of the U.S. midterm elections in November.
Google’s advertising business soared more than 20% in the third quarter, thanks to the search giant’s dominance of search—and mobile search in particular.Paid clicks on ads on Google-owned properties, such as its search engine and YouTube, jumped 62% compared with the same period a year ago and 10% over the previous quarter.Alphabet delivered mixed third quarter financial results on Thursday, topping profit estimates but missing on revenue.
