Amazon.com, Inc.

Good day, everyone, and welcome to the Amazon.com Fourth Quarter 2023 Financial Results Teleconference. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the presentation, we will conduct a question and answer session. Today's call is being recorded. For opening remarks, I will be turning the call over to the Vice President of Investor Relations, Mr. Dave Files. Thank you, sir. Please go ahead.

Hello, and welcome to our Q4 2023 Financial Results Conference call. Joining us today to answer your questions is Andy Jassy, our CEO, and Brian Osofsky, 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 2022. Our comments and responses to your questions reflect management's views as of today, February 1st, 2024 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 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 constraints, world events, the rate of growth of the internet, online commerce, cloud services, and new and emerging technologies, 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 Andy.

Thanks, Dave. Today we're reporting $170 billion in revenue, up 13% year-over-year, excluding the impact from foreign exchange rates, $13.2 billion in operating income, up 383% year-over-year, or $10.5 billion, and $35.5 billion in trailing 12-month free cash flow adjusted for equipment finance leases, up $48.3 billion year-over-year. While we've made meaningful progress in our financial measures, What we're most pleased about is the continued customer experience improvements across our businesses. These results represent a lot of invention, collaboration, discipline, execution, adjusting, and reimagining from teams across Amazon. Looking back at Q4, I'll start with our stores business where customers responded to our continued focus on selection, price, and convenience. We continue to have the broadest retail selection with hundreds of millions of products available and added tens of millions of new items last year alone, including fashion selection from Coach, Victoria's Secret's fashion, Pit Viper, and Beyonce's Renaissance Tour merch, to cosmetics from Lancome, Urban Decay Cosmetics, and No Beauty by Vanessa Hudgens, to consumer technology and services from Boost, Infinite, and Whoop, to homewares from Martha Stewart. Being sharp on price is always important. but particularly in an uncertain economy where customers are careful about how much they're spending. We kicked off the holiday season with Prime Big Deal Days, an exclusive event for Prime members to provide an early start on holiday shopping. This was followed by our extended Black Friday and Cyber Monday holiday shopping event, which was open to all customers and ended up being our largest event ever. These events also helped attract new customers and Prime members. Throughout the quarter, customers saved nearly $10 billion across millions of deals and coupons, almost 70% more than last year. In addition to offering great deals, we continued to improve delivery speeds. In 2023, Amazon delivered to Prime members at the fastest speeds ever, with more than 7 billion items arriving same or next day, including more than 4 billion in the U.S. and more than 2 billion in Europe. In the U.S., this results as the combination of two things. One is the benefit of regionalization, where we re-architected the network to store items closer to customers. The other is the expansion of same-day facilities, where in the U.S. in the fourth quarter, we increased the number of items delivered the same day or overnight by more than 65% year-over-year. As we're able to get customers items this fast, It increases the number of occasions that customers choose Amazon to fulfill their shopping needs, and we can see that in all sorts of areas, including how fast our everyday essentials business is growing. Our regionalization efforts have also brought transportation distances down, which has helped lower our cost to serve. In 2023, for the first time since 2018, we reduced our cost to serve on a per-unit basis globally. In the U.S. alone, cost to serve was down by more than 45 cents per unit compared to the prior year. Lowering cost to serve allows us not only to invest in speed improvements, but also afford adding more selection at lower average selling prices, or ASPs, and profitably. We have a saying that it's not hard to lower prices, it's hard to be able to afford lowering prices. The same is true with adding selection. It's not hard to add lower ASP selection, it's hard to be able to afford offering lower ASP selection and still like the economics. Like improving speed, adding selection puts us in the consideration set for more purchases. As we look toward 2024 and beyond, we're not done lowering our cost to serve. We've challenged every closely held belief in our fulfillment network and re-evaluated every part of it and found several areas where we believe we can lower costs while also delivering faster for customers. Our inbound fulfillment architecture and resulting inventory placement are areas of focus in 2024, and we have optimism there's more upside for us. Alongside our stores business, our advertising growth remains strong, up 26% year-over-year, which is primarily driven by our sponsored ads. We've recently added sponsored TV to this offering in the U.S., a self-service solution for brands to create streaming TV campaigns with no minimum spend, putting this advertising within reach of any business. While still early days, streaming TV advertising continues to grow quickly. Brands are using our capabilities to reach engaged viewers on Twitch, FreeV, Fire TV, and Prime Video shows and movies, which just launched in the U.S., as well as Thursday Night Football. Shifting to AWS, revenue in the quarter grew 13% year-over-year in Q4 versus 12% year-over-year in Q3, and we're now approaching an annualized revenue run rate of $100 billion. We watched the incremental revenue added each quarter, and in Q4, AWS added more than $1.1 billion in incremental quarter-over-quarter revenue, which on an FX-neutral basis is more than any other cloud provider as far as we can tell. While cost optimization continued to attenuate, larger new deals also accelerated, evidenced by recently inked agreements with Salesforce, BMW, NVIDIA, LG, Hyundai, Merck, MUFG, Axiata, Cathay, BYD, Accor, Amgen, and SAIC. Our customer pipeline remains strong as existing customers are renewing at larger commitments over longer periods and migrations are growing. 2023 also was a very significant year of delivery and customer trial for generative AI or GenAI in AWS. You may remember that we've explained our vision of three distinct layers in the GenAI stack, each of which is gigantic and each of which we're deeply investing. At the bottom layer, where customers who are building their own models run training and inference on compute, where the chip is the key component in that compute, we offer the most expansive collection of compute instances with NVIDIA chips. We also have customers who would like us to push the price performance envelope on AI chips, just as we have with Graviton for generalized CPU chips, which are 40% more price performant than other x86 alternatives. And as a result, we've built custom AI training chips named Trainium, and inference chips named Inferentia. At re-event, we announced Tranium 2, which offers four times faster training performance and three times more memory capacity versus the first generation of Tranium, enabling advantageous price performance versus alternatives. We already have several customers using our AI chips, including Anthropic, Airbnb, Hugging Face, Qualtrics, Ricoh, and Snap. In the middle layer, where companies seek to leverage an existing large language model, customize it with their own data, and leverage AWS's security and other features all as a managed service, we've launched Bedrock, which is off to a very strong start with many thousands of customers using the service after just a few months. The team continues to rapidly iterate on Bedrock, recently delivering capabilities including guardrails to safeguard what questions applications will answer, knowledge bases to expand models' knowledge base with retrieval, augmented generation, or RAG, and real-time queries, agents to complete multi-step tasks, and fine-tuning to keep teaching and refining models, all of which will help customers' applications be higher quality and have better customer experiences. We also added new models from Anthropic, Cohere, Meta with Lama 2, Stability AI, and our own Amazon Titan family of LLMs. What customers have learned at this early stage of Gen AI is that there's meaningful iteration required in building a production Gen AI application with the requisite enterprise quality at the cost and latency needed. Customers don't want only one model. They want different models for different types of applications and different size models for different applications. Customers want a service that makes this experimenting and iterating simple. And this is what Bedrock does, which is why so many customers are excited about it. At the top layer of the stack, is the application layer. One of the very best early-gen AI applications is a coding companion. At reInvent, we launched Amazon Q, which is an expert on AWS, writes code, debugs code, tests code, does translations, like moving from an old version of Java to a new one, and can also query customers' various data repositories, like intranets, wikis, or from over 40 different popular connectors to data in Salesforce, Amazon S3, ServiceNow, Slack, Aglassian or Zendesk, among others, and answer questions, summarize this data, carry on a coherent conversation, and take action. It was designed with security and privacy in mind from the start, making it easier for organizations to use generative AI safely. Q is the most capable work assistant in another service that customers are very excited about. By the way, Don't underestimate the point about Bedrock and Q inheriting the same security and access control as customers get with AWS. Security is a big deal, an important differentiator between cloud providers. The data in these models is some of companies' most sensitive and critical assets. With AWS's advanced security capabilities and track record relative to other providers, we continue to see momentum around customers wanting to do their long-term Gen AI work with AWS. We're building dozens of Gen AI apps across Amazon's businesses, several of which have launched and others of which are in development. This morning, we launched Rufus, an expert shopping assistant trained on our product and customer data that represents a significant customer experience improvement for discovery. Rufus lets customers ask shopping journey questions like, what is the best golf ball to use for better spin control? for which are the best cold-weather rain jackets, and get thoughtful explanations for what matters and recommendations on products. You can carry on a conversation with Rufus on other related or unrelated questions, and it retains context coherently. You can sift through our rich product pages by asking Rufus questions on any product features, and it will return answers quickly. We're at the start of what Rufus will do with further personalization and expansion coming, but we're excited about how it'll make discovery even easier on Amazon. Gen AI is and will continue to be an area of pervasive focus and investment across Amazon, primarily because there are few initiatives, if any, that give us the chance to reinvent so many of our customer experiences and processes, and we believe it'll ultimately drive tens of billions of dollars of revenue for Amazon over the next several years. In addition to our stores and AWS businesses, we continue to make progress on newer business investments that have the potential to be important to customers in Amazon long term, touching on two of them. In October, we had a major milestone in our journey to commercialize Project Kuiper, which is our low Earth orbit satellite initiative that aims to provide broadband connectivity to the 400 to 500 million households who don't have it today. We launched two end-to-end prototype satellites into space and successfully validated all key systems and subsystems, made a two-way video call, streamed a prime video movie in Ultra HD 4K, and made an Amazon purchase over our end-to-end communication network. It's rare to be able to exercise all these elements in an initial launch like this. We're on track to launch our first production satellites in the first half of 2024 and start beta testing in the second half of the year. We've still got a long way to go, but are encouraged by our progress. During the quarter, we also completed our second season of Thursday Night Football, which was a rousing success by all accounts. The customer experience continued to improve as our talent, production, streaming quality, analytics, and unique AI features like Prime Vision and defensive alerts all took big leaps forward on top of their very good start last year. We launched a new NFL tradition with the inaugural Black Friday football game, And our continuous innovation resonated with viewers as the number of people watching increased 24% year-over-year and with advertisers as we made dramatic year-over-year gains in ad sales. We have increasing conviction that Prime Video can be a large and profitable business on its own and will continue to invest in compelling exclusive content for Prime members like Thursday Night Football, Go to the Rings, Reacher, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Citadel, and more. And with the addition of ads and Prime Video, we'll be able to continue investing meaningfully in content over time. I'll close by reiterating that 2023 was a really good year, and I'm grateful to all of our teams who delivered on behalf of customers. Yet, I think every one of us at Amazon believes this is just the start of what's possible. We have a long way to go in every one of our businesses before we exhaust how we can make customers' lives better and easier, and there is considerable upside in each of the businesses in which we're investing. With that, I'll turn it over to Brian.