Amazon had another strong holiday season.
The company's quarterly profit topped $3 billion for the first time as revenue grew across its businesses, including online shopping, advertising and cloud computing.
The Seattle-based company's estimated revenue for the current quarter, however, was below what Wall Street analysts expected.
Amazon's stock price rose 1.4 percent in after-hours trading following the earnings announcement.
Amazon, which recently surpassed Microsoft as the most valuable publicly traded company in the U.S., reported net income of $3.03 billion for the last three months of 2018. On a per share basis, it had net income of $6.04, beating the $5.55 per share analysts expected, according to Zacks Investment Research.
Revenue rose 20 percent to $72.38 billion, beating the $71.73 billion that analysts expected.
For the current quarter ending in April, Amazon said it expects revenue in the range of $56 million to $60 million. Analysts expected revenue of $61.19 billion.
Amazon does face some issues outside the U.S. The company began removing a wide array of products from its India website late on Thursday to comply with the new foreign investment curbs that kick in on Feb. 1. These rules disallow companies from selling products via vendors in which they have an equity interest.
Amazon Chief Financial Officer Brian Olsavsky said on a call with reporters that the situation in India is "a bit fluid right now" but remains a good long-term opportunity.
For years, investors have given Amazon a green light to sink money into new endeavors: warehouses and data centers around the world, a studio near Hollywood, research on artificial intelligence. Through these bets, Amazon has lured people to shop online and enterprises to ditch their hardware for the cloud.
Though the company is still marching ahead, challenges have arisen, particularly in markets outside the United states. Analysts have also noted that sales growth slowed down in some European markets during the crucial holiday quarter.
