Is Amazon Profitable? Amazon Profitability 1994-2023 - FourWeekMBA (2024)

Amazon was profitable in 2023. On nearly $575 billion in revenue for 2023, Amazon generated a net profit of over $30 billion. Since 2014, Amazon hasn’t recorded a net loss, but it did record a net loss of over $2.7 billion in 2022, while it recouped that in 2023. Indeed, in 2014, Amazon reported a net loss of $241 million, and it would be profitable until 2021. In 2022, Amazon turned unprofitable again and highly profitable again in 2023.

Amazon aggressive growth

Since its inception, Amazon has been aggressively focusing on growth.

While it managed to survive the dot-com bubble Amazon also hat to tweak its business playbook throughout those years:

Source: Financials

Amazon’s business model today has several moving parts:

• Amazon e-commerce.
• Amazon platform business (Amazon has hosted third-party sellers on the platform since the early 2000s).
• Amazon AWS.
• Amazon Prime.
• Advertising.
• And more.

Below you can appreciate the Amazon business model in full:

As of 2021, Amazon AWS is a major contributor to Amazon’s operating and net income.

That is because AWS has different unit economics logic:

Amazon AWS follows a platform business model that gains traction by tapping into network effects.

Born as an infrastructure built on Amazon’s infrastructure, AWS has become a company offering cloud services to thousands of clients from the enterprise level to startups.

And its marketplace enables companies to connect to other service providers to build integrated solutions for their organizations.

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