Even as Amazon pins hopes on advertising revenues from Prime Video where it will soon introduce ads to the streaming platform, Apple, despite slowdown in sales of iPhones in China, recorded a modest uptick in revenue for the October-December quarter as it said lot of hopes are pinned on the launch of Apple Vision Pro headsets.

On a call with reporters on Thursday, Amazon’s Chief Financial Officer Brian Olsavsky said the company is seeing more purchases from Prime members and added revenue is being driven by fees from third-party sellers and the company’s advertising business, which is poised to grow as the tech giant brings ads to Prime Video.

“There’s a lot of enthusiasm from advertisers,” Olsavsky said, while noting customers who don’t want ads to intrude their streaming experience (on Prime Video) can pay an additional $2.99 per month to avoid it, according to an AP news report yesterday.

Amazon on Thursday reported better-than-expected revenue and profits for the fourth quarter, driven by strong consumer spending during the holiday shopping season.

The Seattle-based e-commerce company said it earned $170 billion in revenue and $10.6 billion in profits during the last three months of 2023, beating expectations from analysts surveyed by FactSet.

In a statement, quoted by the AP report, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy called it a “record-breaking” holiday shopping season for the company, which saw a 14 percent growth in revenue compared to the same period in 2022.

The company said online retail business earned $70.5 billion in revenue during the quarter, a 9 p[cent erjump compared to $64.53 billion during the same period in 2022.

Meanwhile, the company’s cloud computing unit AWS earned $24.2 billion during the last quarter. That represented a 13% jump in revenue compared to the same period in 2022, but its growth has slowed down compared to prior years.

Olsavsky also said he expects AWS to accelerate this year, saying businesses that use the cloud service are cutting costs less than before and are more interested in generative AI products Amazon has rolled out in the past year, like that chatbot Q.

Roughly an hour before it released its earnings on Thursday, Amazon announced a new generative AI-powered shopping assistant called Rufus.

Overall, the company reported it earned $30.4 billion in profits last year after losing $2.7 billion in 2022.

In an effort to increase profitability and cut down on costs, Amazon laid off roughly 27,000 corporate employees between late 2022 and early last year. The company and subsidiaries, such as the streaming platform Twitch and the audiobook service Audible, also cut thousands of jobs last month.

Apple Eyes Bright Prospects Via Vison Pro Headsets: Meanwhile, Apple snapped out of a yearlong sales funk during its holiday-season quarter, propelled by solid demand for the latest model of its iPhone and still-robust growth in a services division facing legal threats that could undermine its prospects, AP said in a report from San Francisco.

The modest revenue growth announced Thursday as part of Apple’s October-December results ended four consecutive quarters of year-over-year sales declines.

But the performance still may not be enough to allay recent investor concerns about Apple’s ability to rebuild the momentum that established it as the most valuable US publicly traded company. After years of holding that mantle, Apple recently ceded the top spot to its long-time rival Microsoft.

Apple is hoping to shift the narrative back in its favor with the launch of its Vision Pro headsets that transports users into a hybrid of physical and digital environments — a combination the company is promoting as “spatial computing.” But the first version of the Vision Pro will cost $3,500 — a lofty price tag analysts expect to constrain demand this year.

(Indianbroadcastingworld.com accessed a Disney release stating that Disney+ would be part of Apple Vision Pro services.)

“We are optimistic about the future, confident in the long term, and excited as we have ever been,” Apple CEO Tim Cook assured analysts during a Thursday conference call about the latest quarterly results, the APL report added.

Despite recurring worries that Apple may be entering a period of slower growth compared with its track record over the past 20 years, the California-based company is still thriving.

Apple’s revenue for its most recent quarter rose 2 percent from the same time in the previous year to $119.58 billion. The company earned $33.92 billion, or $2.18 per share, a 13 percent gain from the same time last year.

As usual, the iPhone accounted for the bulk of Apple’s revenue. Sales of the company’s marquee product totaled $69.7 billion in the past quarter, a 6 percent increase from the same time in the prior year. Those results include the latest iPhone that came out in late September, including a premium model that includes a special video recording feature designed for playing back on the Vision Pro.