Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript February 2, 2023

Operator: Thank you for standing by. Good day, everyone, and welcome to the Amazon.com Quarter 4 2022 Financial Results Teleconference. . And for opening remarks, I will be turning the call over to the Vice President of Investor Relations, Dave Fildes. Thank you, sir. Please go ahead.

Dave Fildes: Hello, and welcome to our Q4 2022 financial results conference call. Joining us today to answer your questions is Andy Jassy, our CEO; and Brian Olsavsky, our CFO. As you listen to today’s conference call, we encourage you to have our press release in front of you, which includes our financial results as well as metrics and commentary on the quarter. Please note, unless otherwise stated, all comparisons in this call will be against our results for the comparable period of 2021. Our comments and responses to your questions reflect management’s views as of today, February 2, 2023 only, and will include forward-looking statements. Actual results may differ materially. Additional information about factors that could potentially impact our financial results is included in today’s press release and our filings with the SEC, including our most recent annual report on Form 10-K and subsequent filings.

During this call, we may discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures. In our press release, slides accompanying this webcast and our filings with the SEC, each of which is posted on our IR website, you will find additional disclosures regarding these non-GAAP measures, including reconciliations of these measures with comparable GAAP measures. Our guidance incorporates the order trends that we’ve seen to date and what we believe today to be appropriate assumptions. Our results are inherently unpredictable and may be materially affected by many factors, including uncertainty regarding the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic; fluctuations in foreign exchange rates; changes in global economic and geopolitical conditions; and customer demand and spending, including the impact of recessionary fears, inflation, interest rates, regional labor market and global supply chain constraints, world events, the rate of growth of the Internet, online commerce and cloud services and the various factors detailed in our filings with the SEC.

Our guidance assumes, among other things, that we don’t conclude any additional business acquisitions, restructurings or legal settlements. It’s not possible to accurately predict demand for our goods and services and, therefore, our actual results could differ materially from our guidance. And now I’ll turn the call over to Brian.

Brian Olsavsky: Thank you for joining today’s call. As Dave mentioned earlier, I’m joined today by Andy Jassy, our CEO. Before we move on to take your questions, I will make some comments about our Q4 results. Let’s start with revenue. For the fourth quarter, worldwide net sales were $149.2 billion, representing an increase of 12% year-over-year, excluding approximately 360 basis points of unfavorable impact from changes in foreign exchange rates and above the top end of our Q4 guidance range. We’ve seen that during periods of economic uncertainty, consumers are very careful about how they allocate their resources and where they choose to spend their money. Throughout Amazon’s history, we have found that our focus on the customer helps to set us apart in times like these.

This past holiday season, customers came to Amazon for great deals, fast delivery and our widest-ever selection, bolstered by nearly 2 million third-party seller partners who sell on Amazon. Enterprise customers continued their multi-decade shift to the cloud while working closely with our AWS teams to thoughtfully identify opportunities to reduce costs and optimize their work. In our worldwide stores business, with the ongoing economic uncertainty, coupled with the continuation of inflationary pressures, customers remain cautious about their spending behavior. We saw them spend less on discretionary categories and shift to lower-priced items and value brands in categories like electronics. We also saw them continue to spend on everyday essentials, such as consumables, beauty and softlines.

Our teams worked hard to offer low prices and secure millions of deals for customers in Q4, including our first-ever Prime Early Access Sale in October and the more traditional Thanksgiving to Cyber Monday holiday weekend. These global sales events outperformed our expectations as customers responded to millions of deals across our growing selection. Third-party sellers remain a key contributor to that expanding selection. In Q4, sellers comprised a record 59% of overall unit sales. Sellers, vendors and brands continue to look to Amazon’s advertising capabilities to reach customers in the always competitive holiday season, even as the macro environment required them to scrutinize their own marketing budgets. We saw good growth in advertising revenues in Q4, up 23% year-over-year, excluding the impact of foreign exchange.

Prime membership continues to be a great value for our customers, and improving our Prime benefits is a continuous part of our investment strategy. Along with competitive pricing, broad selection and faster delivery speed, we’ve seen Prime members respond to our expanding entertainment offerings. During the quarter, we completed our first season of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, the most watched Amazon original series in every region of the world, reaching over 100 million viewers and driving more Prime sign-ups worldwide during its launch window than any previous Prime Video content. We also finished our inaugural season as the exclusive home of Thursday Night Football, reaching the youngest median age audience of any NFL broadcast package since 2013 and increasing viewership by 11% from last year among hard-to-reach 18- to 34-year-olds.

Photo by Christian Wiediger on Unsplash

In aggregate, we invested approximately $7 billion in 2022 across Amazon Originals, live sports and licensed third-party video content included with Prime. That’s up from about $5 billion in 2021. As a reminder, these digital video content costs are included in cost of sales on our income statement. We regularly evaluate the return on the spend and continue to be encouraged by what we see, as video has proven to be a strong driver of Prime member engagement and new Prime member acquisition. Moving on to AWS. Net sales increased $21.4 billion in Q4, up 20% year-over-year and now representing an annualized sales run rate of more than $85 billion. Starting back in the middle of the third quarter of 2022, we saw our year-over-year growth rates slow as enterprises of all sizes evaluated ways to optimize their cloud spending in response to the tough macroeconomic conditions.

As expected, these optimization efforts continued into the fourth quarter. Some of the key benefits of being in the cloud compared to managing your own data center are the ability to handle large demand swings and to optimize costs relatively quickly, especially during times of economic uncertainty. Our customers are looking for ways to save money, and we spend a lot of our time trying to help them do so. This customer focus is in our DNA and informs how we think about our customer relationships and how we will partner with them for the long term. As we look ahead, we expect these optimization efforts will continue to be a headwind to AWS growth in at least the next couple of quarters. So far in the first month of the year, AWS year-over-year revenue growth is in the mid-teens.

That said, stepping back, our new customer pipeline remains healthy and robust, and there are many customers continuing to put plans in place to migrate to the cloud and commit to AWS over the long term. Now let’s shift to worldwide operating income. For the quarter, we reported $2.7 billion in operating income. The operating income was negatively impacted by 3 large items, which added approximately $2.7 billion of costs in the quarter. This was related to employee severance, impairments of property and equipment and operating leases and changes in estimates related to self-insurance liabilities. This cost primarily impacted our North America segment. If we had not incurred these charges in Q4, our operating income would have been approximately $5.4 billion.

We are encouraged with the progress we continue to make in streamlining the costs in our Amazon stores business. We entered the quarter with labor more appropriately matched to demand across our operations network compared to Q4 of last year, allowing us to have the right labor in the right place at the right time and drive productivity gains. We also saw continued efficiencies across our transportation network, where process and tech improvements resulted in higher Amazon Logistics productivity and improved line haul fill rates. While transportation overperformed expectations in the quarter, we also saw productivity improvements across our fulfillment centers, in line with our plan. We also saw good leverage driven by strong holiday volumes.

Overall, it was a strong effort by the operations team, and we look forward to making further headway as we head into 2023. We remain focused on driving cost efficiencies throughout the network and reducing our cost to serve our customers, while ensuring we maintain an outstanding customer experience. Circling back to the 3 large charges during the quarter. Let me share some additional color, starting with the job eliminations we initiated during the fourth quarter. As we consider the ongoing uncertainties of the macroeconomic environment, this led us to the difficult decision to eliminate just over 18,000 roles, primarily impacting our stores and device businesses as well as our human resources teams. As a result, we recorded estimated severance cost of $640 million.

These charges were recorded primarily in technology and content, fulfillment and general administration on our income statement. Next, we recorded impairments of property and equipment and operating leases, primarily related to our Amazon Fresh and Amazon Go physical stores. We’re continuously refining our store formats to find the ones that will resonate with customers, will build our grocery brand and will allow us to scale meaningfully over time. As such, we periodically access our portfolio of stores and decided to exit certain stores with low growth potential. We’ll also take an impairment on capitalized costs and associated values of our leased buildings. The impairment charge in Q4 was $720 million and is included in other operating expense on our income statement.

We continue to believe grocery is a significant opportunity, and we’re focused on serving customers through multiple channels, whether that’s online delivery, pickup or in-store shopping. Lastly, during the quarter, we increased our reserves for general product and automobile self-insurance liabilities, driven by changes in our estimates about the cost of asserted and unasserted claims, resulting in additional expense of $1.3 billion. This impact is primarily recorded in cost of sales on our income statement. As our business has grown quickly over the last several years, particularly as we’ve built out our fulfillment and transportation network and claim amounts have seen industry-wide inflation, we’ve continued to evaluate and adjust this reserve for both asserted claims as well as our estimate for unasserted claims.

We reported overall net income of $278 million in the fourth quarter. While we primarily focus our comments on operating income, I’d point out that this net income includes a pretax valuation loss of $2.3 billion included in nonoperating income from our common stock investment in Rivian Automotive. As we’ve noted in recent quarters, this activity is not related to Amazon’s ongoing operations but rather the quarter-to-quarter fluctuations in Rivian’s stock price. As we head into the new year, we remain heads-down focused on driving a better customer experience. We believe putting customers first is the only reliable way to create lasting value for our shareholders.

Andrew Jassy: Everybody, this is Andy. Just before we start with the questions, I just wanted to say it’s good to be with you all on the call today. I thought I might jump on the calls from time to time moving forward. And given that this last quarter was the end of my first full year in this role, and given some of the unusual parts in the economy and our business, I thought this might be a good one to join. So thanks for having me.

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Q&A Session

Operator: . And our first question comes from the line of Brian Nowak with Morgan Stanley.

Brian Nowak: I have two. Andy, I want to ask you, just the first one, you’ve been in the seat for a while. As you sit there, what are your key focal points, product categories or investment priorities that you’re most focused on to drive durable multiyear growth in that North America retail segment as we recover? And then the second one, just sort of staying on the North America retail side, how do you think about the potential margin potential of that business over the next few years as you sort of grow into the warehouse? And what are the warehouse network? And what are the efficiency factors to get you to those goals?

Brian Olsavsky: Brian, this is Brian. First, let me just start with your second question. On the — sorry, can you hear me? On the expectation for retail margins, especially in North America, what we’ve said is when we look back to our cost structure pre-pandemic, we were just in the end of 2019, early part of 2020. We’re just starting to roll out one-day shipping in North America, and we had an expectation of what our cost structure would look like. That has changed quite a bit in the last 3 years now due to a doubling of our network expansion. I think you’ve heard me tell this story on different calls. But essentially, we’re now trying to, again, regain our cost structure that we’ve had in the past, balance the — and get more efficient on the assets we’ve added in the last 2, 3 years now and also look at all the investment areas that we are working on to drive growth, continuing to look at them where we need to make course corrections, where we need to change things up.

And we expect that, again, a lot of the improvement will be in North America operations costs. We made good headway in 2022. We always want to make more, and we’re going to be working on this definitely through 2023 and beyond. But we hope to make and expect to make big improvements in 2023.

Andrew Jassy: Yes. And I’ll start just at a broad level, priority-wise, the connective tissue for everything we do across the company, including in stores in North America, is we realize that we exist to make customers’ lives better and easier every day and relentlessly went to do so. And being maniacally focused on the customer experiences, always going to be a top priority for us. At the same time, and this is true in North America as well as across the entire business, we’re working really hard to streamline our costs and trying to do so at the same time that we don’t give up on the long-term strategic investments that we believe can meaningfully change broad customer experiences and change Amazon over the long term. As I addressed directly the North American stores questions, I think our — probably the #1 priority that I spent time with the team on is reducing our cost to serve in our operations network.