Amazon beat analysts estimates for Q3 2023 on improvements to its fulfillment operations and strong cloud performance.

Amazon says its net sales came in at $143.1 billion, a 13% increase over the year-ago quarter. The company’s operating income came in at $11.2 billion, up from $2.5 billion a year ago. Similarly, net income was $9.9 billion ($0.94 per diluted share), up from $2.9 billion ($0.28 per diluted share) a year ago.

The company’s changes to its fulfillment process, as well as AWS’ performance, were major factors in the company’s results.

“We had a strong third quarter as our cost to serve and speed of delivery in our Stores business took another step forward, our AWS growth continued to stabilize, our Advertising revenue grew robustly, and overall operating income and free cash flow rose significantly,” said Andy Jassy, Amazon CEO. “The benefits of moving from a single national fulfillment network in the U.S. to eight distinct regions are exceeding our optimistic expectations, and perhaps most importantly, putting us on pace to deliver the fastest delivery speeds for Prime customers in our 29-year history. The AWS team continues to innovate and deliver at a rapid clip, particularly in generative AI, where the combination of our custom AI chips, Amazon Bedrock being the easiest and most flexible way to build and deploy generative AI applications, and our coding companion (CodeWhisperer) allowing enterprises to have the equivalent of an experienced engineer who understands all of their proprietary code is driving momentum with customers, including adidas, Booking.com, GoDaddy, LexisNexis, Merck, Royal Philips, and United Airlines, all of whom are starting to run generative AI workloads on AWS. Between AWS re:Invent and our 29th holiday shopping season, this is a particularly action-packed time of year at Amazon and we’re excited for what’s to come.”