By Yasin Ebrahim
Investing - Amazon surged in after-hours trading Thursday as better-than-expected fourth-quarter earnings, underpinned by strong cloud growth, offset weaker guidance on sales.
Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN) was up more than 14% in afterhours following the report.
Amazon.com announced earnings per share of $27.75 on revenue of $137.41 billion. Analysts polled by Investing.com anticipated EPS of $3.71 on revenue of $137.75 billion.
Net sales in North America rose 9.3% to $82.35 billion.
Amazon Web Services, its fast and high margin cloud revenue segment, grew 40% to $17.78 billion.
Looking ahead to Q1, Amazon guided sales between $112 billion and $117 billion, missing analysts estimates for $121.44 billion.
Amazon also said it would hike the price of its Prime membership to offset rising costs.
In the U.S., the monthly price of a Prime membership will increase to $14.99 from $12.99 , and the annual membership will climb to $139 to $119. This is the first time Amazon has raised the price of Prime since 2018.
"As expected over the holidays, we saw higher costs driven by labor supply shortages and inflationary pressures, and these issues persisted into the first quarter due to Omicron," the company said.