Amazon (AMZN): Week ahead, Q3 results on 29 October after a Q2 with AWS up 37% and a forecast of 9% to 12% sales growth
Amazon has said it will hold its third-quarter results call on Thursday 29 October 2026 at 2:00 p.m. Pacific time (5:00 p.m. Eastern). Here is what the company itself reported for the second quarter and the forecast it set for the third, so readers can compare the new numbers with them.
What happened
Amazon's investor page announces that its Q3 2026 financial results conference call will take place on 29 October at 2:00 p.m. PT / 5:00 p.m. ET and will be webcast live, with audio and slides kept at amazon.com/ir for at least three months afterwards. The company has not published any third-quarter figures yet. Everything below about the past is from Amazon's results for the second quarter, the three months to 30 June 2026, which it released on 30 July 2026 in a press release filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on Form 8-K, the form used to report major events. Those are reported (GAAP, the standard US accounting rules) figures in US dollars, and the forecast is the company's own, not a fact.
The numbers, explained
Our working on the second quarter: net sales, the money from everything Amazon sells, rose from $167,702m to $200,606m, an increase of $32,904m or 19.6% (200,606 / 167,702 = 1.196), which the company rounds to 20%. Operating income, the profit from running the business before interest and tax, rose from $19,171m to $27,461m, up 43.2%. That is an operating margin, the share of sales kept as operating profit, of 13.7% (27,461 / 200,606) against 11.4% (19,171 / 167,702) a year earlier. Amazon's cloud-computing arm, Amazon Web Services (AWS), which rents computing power and software to businesses, had sales of $42,232m against $30,873m, up 36.8%. Its operating income rose 63.6%, from $10,160m to $16,621m, a margin of 39.4% against 32.9% (16,621 / 42,232 and 10,160 / 30,873).
Other parts of the business grew more slowly. North America sales rose 16.1% to $116,177m (from $100,068m), International sales rose 14.8% to $42,197m (from $36,761m), and advertising sales rose 26.2% to $19,809m (from $15,694m). Net income was $62,647m, or $5.75 a share, against $18,164m, or $1.68, but this is inflated by $53.4bn of non-operating income before tax, which the company says came mainly from its investments in Anthropic, an artificial intelligence company. That gain sits outside operating income, so the operating figures above are the better guide to the day-to-day business. Spending also matters: purchases of property and equipment, net of proceeds from sales and incentives, over the last twelve months were $169,007m (173,028 minus 4,021) against $102,953m (107,656 minus 4,703), a rise of $66.1bn, mainly for artificial intelligence. Free cash flow, the cash left after running costs and that spending, was an outflow of $7.6bn over twelve months (161,403 minus 169,007) against an inflow of $18.2bn.
Why it matters
Amazon makes money in three main ways: selling goods and letting other sellers use its site, selling advertising, and renting out AWS. In the second quarter AWS was about 21% of sales (42,232 / 200,606) but 61% of operating profit (16,621 / 27,461), so the cloud business matters far more to profit than to sales. That is why a single figure, AWS growth, gets so much attention on results day, and why the large spending on data centres and chips is watched alongside it.
The third-quarter forecast gives a yardstick for the results. Amazon expects net sales of $197.0bn to $202.0bn, which it says is growth of 9% to 12% on the third quarter of 2025; we calculate the same range from last year's $180,169m (197,000 / 180,169 = 1.093 and 202,000 / 180,169 = 1.121), taken from the company's quarterly table. It expects operating income of $22.5bn to $26.5bn, against $17.4bn a year earlier, which would be growth of 29% to 52% (22.5 / 17.4 and 26.5 / 17.4). Amazon says the lower sales growth than in the second quarter is partly due to the timing of its Prime Day sales event, and that without Prime Day in both years the growth rate would be nearly 4 percentage points higher. The forecast also assumes an unfavourable effect of about 0.8 percentage points from exchange rates.
What to watch next
Dated and confirmed: Amazon's third-quarter results and call are on Thursday 29 October 2026 at 2:00 p.m. PT / 5:00 p.m. ET. Once the figures are out, readers can compare them with the company's own ranges above: sales of $197.0bn to $202.0bn and operating income of $22.5bn to $26.5bn, plus AWS sales against the $42,232m of the second quarter, and the spending and free cash flow figures. We make no prediction about the results and the announcement gives the call time only, not the time the written release is published.
- Operating income: profit from running the business, before interest and tax
- AWS: Amazon Web Services, the cloud-computing arm
- Free cash flow: cash from operations minus spending on equipment and buildings
- Operating margin: operating income as a share of sales
Sources
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