Amazon Q2 sales up 23% to $19.34B; now stocking over 17M products in India marketplace

World's largest e-commerce company Amazon.com, Inc. has reported 23 per cent increase in its net sales for the second quarter ended June 30, 2014 to $19.34 billion from $15.70 billion last year. Excluding the $237 million favourable impact from in foreign exchange rates, net sales grew 22 per cent.

Service sales now comprise a little over 20 per cent of overall revenues, having grown a tad faster than product sales in Q2.

Its sales from North America rose 26.3 per cent, faster than the 18.4 per cent growth in the international market. Net shipping cost (revenue less expenses) was $718 million or 4.6 per cent of net sales for the quarter.

In North America non-media, non-electronics & general merchandise sales grew the fastest at 38 per cent while in the international market electronics was the main growth driver rising 25 per cent.

Net loss for the quarter, however, widened to $126 million from $7 million in the year-ago quarter.

For the quarter, operating loss was $15 million, as against operating income of $79 million last year.

"We continue working hard on making the Amazon customer experience better and better," said Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com.

"We've recently introduced Sunday delivery coverage to 25 per cent of the US population, launched European cross-border casino two-day delivery for Prime, launched Prime Music with over one million songs, created three original kids TV series, added parental controls to Fire TV with FreeTime, and launched Kindle Unlimited, an eBook subscription service," he added.

During the period, the company launched its latest bling factor Fire phone besides Amazon Zocalo; T2 instances, an SSD-backed EBS volume, Amazon Cognito; Amazon Mobile Analytics, and the AWS Mobile SDK for its AWS customers.

The company has also said that since launching its India marketplace a year ago, Amazon has rapidly expanded selection, averaging a launch of one new category every 13 days. Indian customers can now shop from over 17 million products (Flipkart which opened its site to other vendors roughly the same time Amazon started in India now has 15 million products as per its latest communication) from small and medium businesses in the country, it noted.