Amazon sales soar amid fear of sluggish economy 

Amazon sales of e-commerce firm perked up in the three months to June after months of lacklustre spending amidst a broader, lagging economy.

The uptick follows a motivation by boss Andy Jassy to make the online shopping Amazon sales and delivery network run faster and more smoothly, the company said.

It helped to push overall sales up 11% year-on-year to a better-than-anticipated $134.4bn (£105.4bn). Amazon’s July Prime Day was its most significant, with 375 million items bought.

The business outperformed analyst anticipations, with quarterly earnings of $6.7bn (£5.2bn), up from a $2bn loss a year before. That was the company’s most considerable profit in almost a year. Boss Andy Jassy said the results revealed “another strong quarter of progress”.

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Though prominent for its online shopping operation, Amazon’s financial outcomes are driven far more by units such as its cloud computing firm, named AWS, and – in more recent years – advertising. AWS’s sales had stabilised, increasing 12% year-on-year, as companies became less worried about the economy. Advertising earnings lifted 22% year-on-year.

The update arrives as a string of other data suggests that a few of the darkest clouds over the international economy may be beginning to lift.

The firm’s executives said customers were still keeping a close eye on their budgets, which in many nations have been squeezed as prices increase at the fastest rate in decades.