Amazon Announces Q4 2008 Results

Seattle, Washington-based Amazon.com has announced its financial results for Q4 2008.

The company, America’s largest online retailer, has reported an operating income of USD 272 million for Q4 2008, which is just a million more than that reported in Q4 2007. The net income of the company in Q4 2008 was USD 225 million, which translates to USD 0.52 per diluted share. This is again more or less flat in comparison to Q4 2007, when the net income was USD 207 million.

For the full year ending December 31, 2008, the company witnessed a net sale of USD 19.17 billion, compared to USD 14.84 billion for 2007. Operating income showed an increase of 28% to USD 842 million, while net income jumped by 36% to USD 645 million.

The latest quarter also saw Amazon introducing a concept called “Frustration-Free Packaging”, which eliminates plastic from packaging materials used by the company. Another initiative was the launch of “Amazon CloudFront”, which is a self-service, pay-as-you-go web service that delivers content and integrates with Amazon S3 service.

Amazon’s Kindle Store service now holds the largest collection of e-books in the world. Q4 2008 saw an addition of 45,000 titles to the store, taking the total collection to 230,000 titles.

Read more about Amazon’ financial performance, here.