Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) recently announced its fourth-quarter results that surpassed all market expectations. For a short moment, post the announcement of the results, the company even went into the trillion-dollar valuation territory. However, it failed to maintain the levels for long.

Amazon’s Financials

Amazon’s revenues for the quarter grew 21% to $87.4 billion, ahead of the market’s forecast of $86 billion. Net income grew 8% to $3.3 billion. Non-GAAP EPS was $6.47 compared with the Street’s forecast of $4.04. For the quarter, Amazon continued to invest heavily in accelerating its product deliveries. Shipping costs for the quarter grew 43% to a record spend of $12.9 billion.

By segment, net product sales increased 13% to $44.7 billion and net service sales increased 33% to $27.68 billion.

Among key metrics, it reported 150 million global Prime members. Its AWS cloud unit revenue grew 34% to $9.9 billion, ahead of the market’s forecast of $9.8 billion. However, this was the weakest growth rate for Amazon since it started announcing AWS revenues. The slowing growth rate reflects the continued expansion of Microsoft and Google’s cloud initiatives. Its physical-store sales, which includes the Whole Foods store, dropped 1% to $4.4 billion and revenues from the “other” category, which largely consists of its advertising business, grew 41% to $4.8 billion.

For the year, Amazon revenues grew 20% to $280.5 billion. Net income was $11.6 billion or $23.01 per share compared with $10.1 billion reported a year ago.

For the current quarter, Amazon expects revenues of $69-$73 billion, compared with the market’s estimates of $71.61 billion.

Amazon’s Product Upgrades

During the recently held CES 2020, Amazon announced several new Alexa integrations with new automotive brands. Alexa will soon be a part of Fiat Chrysler Automobiles, Lamborghini’s Huracan Evo range, and Rivian’s electric vehicle lineup. Additionally, Amazon continued to add several new features to Alexa including medication reminders and voice refills, BuzzFeed Tasty recipe videos, the ability to pay utility bills and to purchase fuel at over 11,500 Exxon and Mobil stations. Alexa is also integrated with Spotify Free, Spotify Podcasts, Apple Podcasts, SiriusXM’s On Demand library, and Tubi TV to allow consumers to take Alexa’s help to listen to these stations.

Besides Alexa, Amazon has been investing in Fire TV as well. Fire TV now has more than 40 million active users worldwide. Amazon recently announced the new Fire TV Edition which includes additional features and services that will help developers, operators, device makers, and manufacturers to integrate Fire TV into their products. BMW and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles are also working on introducing Fire TV in their future vehicles.

Spurred by the increasing awareness of privacy controls for smart products, Amazon upgraded the Ring. It now has an all-new Control Center that provides a simple dashboard where customers can view and control privacy and security settings.

Amazon also announced significant upgrades for AWS such as the AWS Outposts that is a fully-managed service that extends AWS infrastructure and services to virtually any data center, co-location space, or on-premises facility; AWS Local Zones which is a new type of AWS infrastructure deployment that places AWS compute, storage, database, and other select services closer to large population, industry, and IT centers where no AWS Region exists today; AWS Wavelength, which enables developers to build applications that deliver single-digit millisecond latencies to mobile devices and users by deploying AWS compute and storage at the edge of the 5G network.

Amazon is also integrating AI capabilities into AWS and announced new AI services such as Amazon Kendra which will help enterprise search by using natural language processing and other machine learning techniques, Amazon CodeGuru to help software developers automate code reviews and identify an application’s most expensive lines of code; Amazon Fraud Detector to identify online identity and payment fraud in real-time; Amazon Transcribe Medical for healthcare providers to get accurate, real-time speech-to-text transcription, and Amazon Augmented Artificial Intelligence (A2I) to help developers validate machine learning predictions through human confirmation.

Amazon’s India Expansion

Amazon is also looking at expanding its international footprint. Within devices, for the Fire TV, it entered into an agreement with Onida to help market Fire TV in India. It also launched Ring Alarm in the UK as well as the all-new Indoor Cam and Stick Up Cam in several countries such as Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the UK, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain.

It launched Prime in September in Brazil and the country has delivered the fastest growth in paid Prime members in Amazon’s history. It is also adding significant international streaming content. Prime Video announced four new original productions for 2020 and will debut All or Nothing: Brazil National Football Team on January 31st.

But one of the biggest markets that Amazon is focusing on is India. It recently pledged to invest $1 billion to help digitize traders and micro, small, and medium-sized businesses (MSMBs) across India. It has a goal of bringing more than 10 million MSMBs online by 2025. Amazon already has over 550,000 sellers on the Amazon India marketplace and more than 60,000 Indian manufacturers and brands who are exporting their Made in India products to customers worldwide on Amazon. Amazon is hopeful that the billion-dollar investment will help drive $10 billion in cumulative Indian exports by 2025.

Besides supporting e-commerce in the country, Amazon is also looking at expanding employment opportunities. Since its launch in India in 2013, Amazon has created more than 700,000 direct and indirect jobs in India. Its campus in Hyderabad is Amazon’s first fully-owned campus outside the United States and the largest building globally in terms of employees and space. It recently announced plans to create an additional one million jobs in India by 2025.

India is among the fastest-growing e-commerce markets in the world. Analysts expect the country to record $120 billion in e-commerce revenues this year, recording a growth of 51% over the year. There are several big players who have been trying to tap into the market – Walmart through its Flipkart acquisition, eBay through its dedicated India portal and Amazon itself. But the country is not very welcoming to foreign investment in the sector. Jeff Bezos’s arrival in the country was welcomed by small traders announcing plans to protest against Amazon. The country and its traders are worried that giants like Amazon and Walmart will intensify price pressures making it difficult for small traders and their brick-and-mortar shops to operate their businesses successfully.

Its stock is trading at $2,008.72 with a market capitalization of $995.9 billion. It had touched a 52-week high of $2,055.72 last week in the after-hours session post results announcement. Amazon hit a 52-week low of $1,566.66 in January last year.