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AMZN Q1 2026 Earnings Call
April 29, 2026 at 12:00 AM
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Company
AMZN
Quarter
Q1 2026
Date
April 29, 2026 at 12:00 AM
Speakers
1
Word Count
~8,688
Transcript Content
null
Yeah, thank you. good afternoon and thanks for taking the question um i wanted to ask a little bit about amazon leo um can you maybe help dimensionalize some of the you know the revenue opportunity in the consumer and uh in the enterprise space over the next few years what are the governors on the ramp um could you talk about types of new services that you will be able to develop with the global star infrastructure and the spectrum that maybe you couldn't address before or would take you and You can get to work more quickly now. And then, you know, how expansive is the longer-term vision? You know, I know you're just beginning to launch commercial services, but, you know, over the long term, do you expect to include, you know, non-communication services like orbital data centers or things like that as this becomes feasible in the, you know, in the decade ahead? Andy Jassy (CEO): Yeah, I'll try and address as many of those questions as I can. You know, I am very bullish about Amazon Leo and the opportunity there. There are billions of people around the world who do not have access to broadband connectivity. And there are many thousands of businesses and government assets that people don't have visibility to because they don't have the right connectivity. And it means that those entities can't do a lot of the things that we all take for granted today, including, you know, education online, business online, shopping or entertainment online, having constant visibility and digital twins. There's all these things that they can't do today. And so we think that Amazon Leo is going to help solve that problem. I think when we launch our service commercially, and we've got, you know, we just had another launch this week, so we have over 250 satellites in space. When we launch that service commercially, it will be one of two offerings that are on the current technology edge. And I think that we will have a meaningful advantage in performance. I think we'll be about two times better on the downlink than existing alternatives and about six times better on the uplink performance than existing alternatives. I think we'll have a cost advantage for customers. And then for the governments and the enterprises, and we talked to a lot of them, and we have already signed agreements with many of them, even though we haven't launched the service commercially, you know, the latest of which was Delta Airlines committing at least half of their fleet starting in 2028. When you talk to them, another really big part of what matters to them is they're going to want to take this data off of the satellite constellation, and they're going to want to store it in the cloud, and they're going to want to do analytics on it, and they're going to want to do AI on it. And just the combination of LEO with the leading cloud in the world in AWS is very compelling to enterprises and to government. So, you know, I think the are only, you know, today, if you ask what stops us from growing the business, we have to get the constellation into space. We have over 20 launches planned this year. We have over 30 launches planned in 2027. But I think the business has a chance to be a very large, you know, many billion dollar revenue business. And I think it has some characteristics that are reminiscent of AWS in that it's capital intensive up front where you're committing a lot of capital and cash in the early years for assets that you get to leverage over a long period of time. And so I like the free cash flow and return on invested capital characteristics of that business in the medium to long term. You know, and the last thing I'll say about it is, you know, your question about Global Star, you know, increasingly what we're finding with consumers and enterprise and governments is that they don't like to have any periods where they don't have connectivity. It just upsets whatever customer experience they're going through. Even in metropolitan areas, we all hit certain parts of the highway or certain roads where you can't get connectivity or you're hiking, you're skiing. And so increasingly, we see very large demand for consumers to have direct-to-device. And that was really the impetus for our acquisition of Global Star. They have unusual and scarce global spectrum that's required to provide direct-to-device. We also really like the satellite know-how that we'll get as part of that merger with Global Star. And then it also afforded us the opportunity to build a deep relationship with Apple, who's going to use our direct device for their iPhones and for their watches. So very optimistic about the business. null (Operator): And the next question comes from the line of Shweta Kajuria with Wolf Research. Please proceed with your question. Shwetar Kajuria (Analyst โ Wolfe Research): Okay. Thanks a lot for taking my questions. And I wonder, Andy, if you could please talk about, you know, how you're thinking about the increase in price for memory and storage and just the supply chain inflation we're seeing and the impact it could have in CapEx this year and potentially next year as well. And then on Agente Commerce, if you could talk about how you view the opportunity with advertising. I have no doubt that Rufus could be the best shopping assistant available over time. But for advertising opportunity, how do you view that if agents would be the ones taking action to shop? Thanks a lot. Andy Jassy (CEO): So on memory and storage and the supply chain, I think everybody knows that the cost of these components, particularly memory, has skyrocketed. And we're just in a stage where there's just not enough capacity for the amount of demand. We have worked very closely with our strategic partners. We saw this trend happening early, you know, in kind of the middle of the latter part of last year. And we've worked with our strategic suppliers here to get, you know, a significant amount of supply. And so we're working very closely with them. I think the team's been very scrappy. I think we've done a good job in making sure that we're not capacity constrained there. But we watch that very closely. You know, one of the interesting things that we see right now with the change in price and in supply on things like memory is that it is a further impetus pushing companies who have on-premises infrastructure into the cloud. And it's because, in meaningful part, these suppliers are prioritizing their very largest customers, which cloud providers are. And so we have seen a number of conversations we've been having with enterprises for many months where it's just been slower in getting the transformation plan to move to the cloud, accelerate rapidly, just because we have a lot more supply than what others have. So it'll be interesting to see how that evolves over time. It could have, you know, we're doing our best to kind of to have the supply we need and keep the cost in the right spot. But we'll see how that continues to evolve. And I think on the agentic commerce and how that impacts advertising, I actually believe that we're going to like this for advertising. I think it's going to be good for customers. It's going to be good for our business. And I think, first of all, the first thing to remember is the way that our ads team has built tools and agents themselves is making it so much easier to do advertising. You know, if you look at small, medium-sized businesses that had to take, you know, weeks and months to do creative and to pick the right audience, all that is just it's so much faster and so much easier because of our advertising agentic tools and you no longer have to take as much time or spend as much money building the creative so i think they're going to be a lot more advertising advertisers with the rise of what's happening in ai and then if you look at the agentic commerce experiences if you look at any of these agentic experiences they tend to be multi-turn conversations where you're not interacting with one search and getting an answer. You tend to find that you're asking questions, you're narrowing questions, it's asking you questions on what you want. And, you know, in that process of having multi-turns, there are multiple opportunities to surface relevant products to customers, you know, many of which will be organic and some of which will be sponsored. And, you know, and it also gives rise to opportunities like sponsored prompts. And so one of the interesting things that has been very successful for customers in our store has been when they ask certain questions, we give them a number of suggestions that are all created through AI. And we've gotten pretty good at also having sponsored prompts and that mix of questions and prompts that make it easy for people to keep digging deeper into what they're interested in. So, I actually believe that advertising will do well in a world of agentic commerce. null (Operator): Thank you. And our final question comes from the line of Colin Sebastian with Baird. Please proceed with your question. Andy Jassy (CEO): Thanks very much. Good afternoon. Maybe a two-parter, if I could.
null
Andy, first off, just wondering where you're seeing in terms of the trend between incremental AI demand from earlier adopters and larger AWS customers versus maybe how the demand curve is shaping up across the broader enterprise base. And then at a high level, if you think about the use of AI internally across Amazon's businesses, presumably the business overall looks very different in three or four years. Maybe, Andy, if you could contextualize where you see the most opportunity for the technology internally, both in terms of product as well as maybe driving more operating efficiency, I think that would be helpful. Dave Fildes (Head of Investor Relations): Thank you. Andy Jassy (CEO): Yeah, so on the โ what we see in the incremental AI demand from early adopters versus broader enterprise base, there's โ I think it's no secret that you've got, you know, the AI labs are spending an incredible amount of money on compute at this point, and compute both on the AI side as well as on the core side. And the models that they're building and the companies that have successful generative AI applications are certainly spending a lot. And, you know, there's several of those labs. But we also see quite a bit of enterprise adoption and usage of AI. You know, as I've said before, the gorgeous absolute place that we see enterprises having success is in projects that are, you know, around cost avoidance and productivities. These are things like automating customer service or business process automation or fraud or things of that sort. But the number of projects that we're working with across enterprises and that we're now starting to see come to production around brand new experiences, trying to figure out how to reinvent their current experiences, but using inference and AI to be smarter, also very significant. So we're seeing the adoption of both of those segments. On the use of AI internally, you know, and for our current businesses, I think that, you know, the shortest first summary I could give you, Colin, is that I do not see a place in any of our businesses or any of the ways that we do work where we're not going to have giant impact on what we do. You know, I think, you know, I've long had this belief that while you can add incrementally to a lot of your existing customer experiences, different agentic and AI experiences, I really believe that, you know, in the in the fullness of time, and I don't know if that's three years from now or five years from now, or it could be sooner too, that all of these customer experiences we know are going to be completely reinvented. And they're going to have different interfaces. They're going to have different ways that people interact with them. People are going to want to have dialogue with them. And so I think it means that you have to look, you know, it's tricky for if you have an existing business that's doing well, but you have to look at every single one of your customer experience is and you have to be able to carve off resource for that team to think anew about what would the future customer experience look like if you started from scratch today and if you had all the technologies like ai available to you when you started and that is what we're doing in every single one of our experiences and uh if i you know i have a chance to be involved in some of those and they're it's really exciting and uh you know they're experiences that may take a while for customers to get used to and to use over time. You might find different segments like those AI forward experiences more than others early But if you're not actually working on inventing those right now, I think it's going to be very hard to have the business and the experience leadership that we want over a long period Every single one of our consumer businesses, every single one of our businesses in general is working on that. And then I would say internally, I also think that it's going to radically change how we work. It already is. I mean, just look at how coding, agentic coding, is changing how we're all building products. I think it's going to have a comparable impact on how we do DevOps and how we do customer service, how we do research, how we do analytics, how sales is conducted. I think every single one of these functions that we all do at work are going to very significantly change. And that's another area of real focus for us. And, you know, we have this experience I mentioned in my letter, but, you know, if you look at one of our services, we swapped out the engine of the service while we were also running the service full tilt. And normally that would have taken 40 or 50 people about a year to do. and we took five really smart people, AI forward thinking people building on agentic coding tools and those five people rebuilt it in 65 days. Like that is a very different world of operating and that's the world I think we're heading to over the next few years. Dave Fildes (Head of Investor Relations): Thanks for joining us on the call today and for your questions, a replay will be available on our investor relations website for at least three months. We appreciate your interest in Amazon and look forward to talking with you again next quarter.
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Transcript sourced from Financial Modeling Prep (FMP)