Financial report: Amazon's Q1 revenue surged 34%, exceeding market expectations

Today, e-commerce giant Amazon released its first quarter 2012 financial report, with earnings per share of $0.28 and revenue soaring 34% to $13.18 billion, but net income fell 35% to $130 million. This figure is much higher than Wall Street's expectation of $12.9 billion, and Amazon's stock rose 15% as a result.

Amazon said in its financial report that 16 of the top 100 best-selling books are sold exclusively in Amazon's Kindle store, which shows Amazon's dominance in the e-book market. However, Amazon has not yet provided specific data on how many Kindles have been sold. Let's take a look at its performance highlights:

• North American sales increased 36% over last year to $7.43 billion
• Foreign sales increased 32% to $5.76 billion
• Media business grew 19% to $4.71 billion
• Electronics and other general merchandise grew 43% to $7.97 billion
• Operating expenses increased by 36% to $12.99 billion, with Kindle Fire being the main factor affecting the increase in operating expenses.

Amazon founder Bezos particularly emphasized the free e-book borrowing function of Kindle Library for Gold members, saying:

If you are our Gold Member, you don't need to buy any books because you can borrow them directly from the Kindle Library for free. This project has been welcomed not only by Kindle users, but also by authors and customers. Every time you borrow a book, the author can get income, and you don't have to wait in line to borrow a book because we have an endless supply. So far, Kindle is the best-selling e-reader in the world.

Although the specific sales volume of Kindle was not disclosed, Amazon said that Kindle is still its best-selling product and the most popular product among consumers. In the first quarter, 90% of the best-selling products were electronic products, including Kindle, Kindle e-books, movies, music and apps. Now, as Amazon enters the B2B market and opens up the vertical e-commerce platform AmazonSupply, we have reason to expect that it may achieve better results in the future.

At the same time, according to the latest data, Amazon added 9,400 employees this quarter, bringing its total employees to 65,000. The growth rate is much faster than that of Google and Microsoft. Perhaps this rapid expansion is also a major factor affecting its net profit.