Amazon Prime ads help tech giant drive profits

Meanwhile, the company said it had achieved its “fastest speeds ever” across its delivery services, with 75% of packages in London, Tokyo, and Toronto delivered the same day or the day after.

However, unions in the UK and other countries have argued that Amazon’s drive for speed can affect the wellbeing of employees.

Amazon does not recognise any UK worker unions, but Unite the union argues that workers need one because of the company’s “break-neck production targets”.

In response to union action in the UK, Amazon has previously said that it offers competitive pay and other benefits.

Elsewhere in the business, Amazon’s cloud service revenue grew more than analysts had expected, which the company said was due to “AI capabilities reaccelerating its growth rate”.

The company’s AI service, Amazon Bedrock, is a large language model like Open AI’s Chat GPT and Google’s Gemini.

“Tens of thousands of organisations worldwide are using Amazon Bedrock,” Amazon said.

Despite growth beating expectations, Amazon’s share price dipped 3% following the results after the company’s sales guidance for the three months to 30 June was less than expected.

Amazon predicted revenue would be between $144bn (£115bn) and $149bn, growing between 7% and 11%, but this would be less than the $150bn analysts had forecast.