Amazon reported its third-quarter 2025 financial results on Thursday, revealing a 13% increase in sales from June to September.
This financial update comes amid mass layoffs at Amazon. The company is cutting 14,000 employees this week.
In a post-earnings conference call with investors, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy responded to a question about Amazon’s job cuts this week, backtracking on AI innovation as the primary driver of job cuts.
“The announcement we made a few days ago is not really fiscally driven, it’s not really AI driven, at least not at this point. It’s really, culture,” Jassy said. “And if you grow as fast as you have in the last few years, in terms of the size of your business, the number of employees, the number of locations, the type of business you do, you’re going to have a lot more people than you had before, and you’re going to have a lot more layers. It can inadvertently weaken your ownership of the people who own most of the decisions in both directions. These decisions should be made quickly at the front lines, and that can lead to slowing down your actions. ”
“As a management team, we are committed to operating like the world’s largest startup company,” he continued. “It means removing layers. It means increasing the amount of ownership people have, and it means inventing and moving quickly. And I don’t know if there’s ever been a time in the history of Amazon, or the history of business in general, with the technology transformation that’s happening right now, where it’s important to be lean, it’s important to be flat, it’s important to move quickly. That’s what we’re trying to do.”
In its Amazon Web Services (AWS) division, Amazon reported a 20% increase in revenue compared to Q3 2024, with revenue of $33 billion.
The e-commerce giant’s domestic sales rose 11% to $106.3 billion. International sales increased 14% (10% after accounting for exchange rates) to $40.9 billion. Amazon’s ad sales rose 24% to $17.7 billion.
Wall Street expects earnings per share (EPS) of $1.56 on revenue of $177.8 billion, according to analyst consensus data provided by LSEG. Amazon reported adjusted EPS of $1.95 on revenue of $180.2 billion.
According to Amazon, “Operating income was $17.4 billion in the third quarter compared to $17.4 billion in the third quarter of 2024. Operating income for the third quarter of 2025 includes two special charges: $2.5 billion related to a legal settlement with the Federal Trade Commission and $1.8 billion in estimated severance payments primarily related to planned role eliminations. Without these charges, operating income would have been $21.7 billion.”
