Hello, and welcome to our Q2 2024 financial results conference call. Joining us today to answer your questions is Andy Jassy, our CEO, and Brian Olsavsky, our CFO. As you listen to today's conference call, we encourage you to have our press release in front of you, which includes our financial results, as well as metrics and commentary on the quarter. Please note, unless otherwise stated, all comparisons in this call will be against our results for the comparable period of 2023. Our comments and responses to your questions reflect management's views as of today, August 1s, 2024 only, and will include forward-looking statements. Actual results may differ materially. Additional information about factors that could potentially impact our financial results is included in today's press release and our filings with the SEC, including our most recent annual report on Form 10-K and subsequent filings. During this call, we may discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures. In our press release, slides accompanying this webcast, and our filings with the SEC, each of which is posted on our IR website, you will find additional disclosures regarding these non-GAAP measures, including reconciliations of these measures with comparable GAAP measures. Our guidance incorporates the order trends that we've seen to date and what we believe today to be appropriate assumptions. Our results are inherently unpredictable and may be materially affected by many factors, including fluctuations in foreign exchange rates, changes in global economic and geopolitical conditions and customer demand and spending, including the impact of recessionary fears, inflation, interest rates, regional labor market constraints, world events, the rate of growth of the internet, online commerce, cloud services, and new and emerging technologies, and the various factors detailed in our filings with the SEC. Our guidance assumes, among other things, that we don't conclude any additional business acquisitions, restructurings, or legal settlements. It's not possible to accurately predict demand for our goods and services, and therefore, our actual results could differ materially from our guidance. And now, I'll turn the call over to Andy. Andy Jassy : Thanks, Dave. Today, we're reporting $148 billion in revenue, up 11% year-over-year, excluding the impact from foreign exchange rates. Operating income was $14.7 billion, up 91% year-over-year, and trailing 12-month free cash flow adjusted for equipment finance leases was $51.4 billion, up 664% or $44.7 billion year-over-year. As I think about what matters to customers long-term and, therefore, to Amazon, there's a lot to like about what we're seeing. Starting with AWS, year-over-year revenue growth accelerated again from 17.2% in Q1 to 18.8% in Q2. We're continuing to see three macro trends drive AWS growth. First, companies have completed the significant majority of their cost optimization efforts and are focused again on new efforts. Second, companies are spending their energy again on modernizing their infrastructure and moving from on-premises infrastructure to the cloud. This modernization enables builders to save money, innovate at a more rapid clip, and drive productivity in most companies' scarcest resources, developers. This is the flip I've talked about in the past, where the vast majority of global IT spend today is on-premises, and we expect that to keep inverting over time. With the broadest functionality, the strongest security and operational performance, and the deepest partner ecosystem, AWS continues to be customers' partner of choice and the biggest beneficiary of this flip from on-premises to the cloud. And third, builders and companies of all sizes are excited about leveraging AI. Our AI business continues to grow dramatically with a multi-billion dollar revenue run rate despite it being such early days, but we can see in our results and conversations with customers that our unique approach and offerings are resonating with customers. At the heart of this strategy is a firmly held belief, which we've had since the beginning of AWS, that there is not one tool to rule the world. People don't want just one database option or one analytics choice or one container type. Developers and companies not only reject it, but are suspicious of it. They want multiple options for flexibility and to use the best tool for each job to be done. The same is true in AI. You saw this several years ago when some companies tried to argue that TensorFlow would be the only machine learning framework that mattered, and then PyTorch and others overtook it. The same one model or one-chip approach dominated the earliest moments of the generative AI boom, but we have a lot of data to suggest this is not what customers want here either. And our AWS team is determined to deliver choice and options for customers. You can see this philosophy in the primitive building blocks we're building at all three layers of the Gen AI stack. At the bottom layer, which is for those building generative AI models themselves, the cost to compute for training and inference is critical, especially as models get to scale. We have a deep partnership with NVIDIA and the broadest selection of NVIDIA instances available, but we've heard loud and clear from customers that they relish better price performance. It's why we've invested in our own custom silicon in Trainium for training and Inferentia for inference. And the second versions of those chips, with Trainium coming later this year, are very compelling in price performance. We're seeing significant demand for these chips. These model builders also desire services that make it much easier to manage the data, construct the models, experiment, deploy to production, and achieve high-quality performance, all while saving considerable time and money. That's what Amazon SageMaker does so well, including its most recently launched feature called HyperPods that changes the game and networking performance for large models. And we're increasingly seeing model builders standardized on SageMaker. While many teams will build their own models, lots of others will leverage somebody else's frontier model, customize it with their own data and seek a service that provides broad model selection and great generative AI capabilities. This is what we think of as the middle layer, what Amazon Bedrock does and why Bedrock has tens of thousands of companies using it already. Bedrock has the largest selection of models, the best generative AI capabilities in critical areas like model evaluation, guardrails, RAG and agenting, and then makes it easy to switch between different model types and model sizes. Bedrock has recently added Anthropic's Claude 3.5 models, which are the best performing models on the planet. Meta's new Llama 3.1 models and Mistral's new Large two models. And Lama's and Mistral's impressive performance benchmarks in open nature are quite compelling to our customers as well. At the application or top layer, we're continuing to see strong adoption of Amazon Q, the most capable generative AI powered assistant for software development and to leverage your own data. Q has the highest known score and acceptance rate for code suggestions, but it does a lot more than provide code suggestions. It tests code, outperforms all other publicly benchmarkable competitors on catching security vulnerabilities and leads all software development assistants on connecting multiple steps together and applying automatic action. It also saves development teams time and money on the muck nobody likes to talk about. For instance, when companies decide to upgrade from one version of a framework to another, it takes development teams many months, sometimes years, burning valuable opportunity costs and churning developers who hate this tedious, though important work. With Q's code transformation capabilities, Amazon has migrated over 30,000 Java JDK applications in a few months, saving the company $260 million and 4,500 developer years compared to what it would have otherwise cost. That's a game changer. And think about how this Q transformation capability might evolve to address other elusive but highly desired migrations. During the past 18 months, AWS has launched more than twice as many machine learning and generative AI features into general availability than all the other major cloud providers combined. This team is cooking, but we're not close to being done adding capabilities for our customer's usage base. For perspective, we've added over $2 billion in advertising revenue year-over-year and generated more than $50 billion in revenue in the trailing 12 months. Sponsored ads drive the majority of our advertising revenue today and we see further opportunity there. Even with this growth, it's important to realize we're at the very beginning of what's possible in our video advertising. In May, we made our first appearance at the upfronts and were encouraged by the agency and advertiser feedback on the differentiated value we offer across our content, reach, signals, and ad tech. With ads and prime video, the exciting opportunity for brands is the ability to directly connect advertising that's traditionally been focused on driving awareness, as is the case for TV, to a business outcome, like product sales or subscription signups. We're able to do that through our measurement and ad tech, so brands can continually improve the relevance and performance of their ads. While ads have become the norm in streaming video, we aim to have meaningfully fewer ads than linear TV and other streaming TV providers. And of course, for customers preferring an ad-free experience, we offer that option for an additional $2.99 a month. In our stores business, we saw growth of 9% year-over-year in the North America segment and 10% year-over-year in the international segment. A few notes on our North America revenue growth rate. First, last quarter's leap day added about 100 basis points of year-over-year growth. Second, we're seeing lower average selling prices, or ASPs, right now because customers continue to trade down on price when they can. More discretionary higher ticket items, like computers or electronics or TVs, are growing faster for us than what we see elsewhere in the industry, but more slowly than we see in a more robust economy. And our continued faster delivery speed is earning us more of our customers' everyday essentials business. Third, our seller fees are a little lower than expected given the behavior changes we've seen from our latest fee changes. While some of these issues compress short-term revenue, we generally like these trends. While consumers are being careful on price, our North America unit growth is meaningfully outpacing our sales growth as our continued work on selection, low prices, and delivery is resonating. So far this year, our speed of delivery for prime customers has been faster than ever before, with more than 5 billion units arriving the same day or next day. As more customers experience our fast delivery, they look to Amazon for more of their shopping needs, and the continued acceleration of our everyday essentials business is an example of this phenomenon. On seller fees, lowering apparel fees has spurred substantial year-over-year unit growth in apparel. And the incentive we've given sellers to send their items to multiple Amazon inbound facilities so they can save money where they save us effort and money is getting more traction than we even hoped. These collective developments will benefit customers in the form of better selection, lower prices, and faster delivery speed. There's no shortage of ideas aimed in improving the experience for stores' customers. For instance, we're adding even more value to Prime, recently introducing free restaurant delivery in many of our geos, expanding Amazon's PharmacyRx pass to Medicare members. This is a benefit that gives subscribers all you can consume access to the most common generic medications for just $5 a month, and offering a grocery subscription to help save on grocery items when shopping our U.S. and UK fresh stores. As we pursue these initiatives, we remain focused on lowering our cost to serve. We have a number of opportunities to further reduce costs, including expanding our use of automation and robotics, further building out our same-day facility network, and regionalizing our inbound network. With more optimal inbound inventory placement, we expect to enable faster speeds, consolidate more orders in one box, and reduce inventory transfers once items reach a fulfillment center. These cost improvements won't happen in one quarter or one fell swoop. They take technology and process innovation with a lot of outstanding execution, but we see a path to continuing to lower our cost to serve, which as we've discussed in the past, has very meaningful value for customers in our business. As we lower our cost to serve, we can add more low ASP selection that we can support economically, which coupled with our fast delivery, puts Amazon in the consideration set for increasingly more shopping needs for customers. A few other comments about areas in which we're investing. We remain very bullish on the medium to long-term impact of AI in every business we know and can imagine. The progress may not be one straight line for companies. Generative AI especially is quite iterative, and companies have to build muscle around the best way to solve actual customer problems. But we see so much potential to change customer experiences. We see it in how our generative AI-powered shopping assistant Rufus is helping customers make better shopping decisions. We see it in how our AI features that allow customers to simulate trying apparel items or changing the buying experience. We see it in how our generative AI listing tool is enabling sellers to create new selection with a line or two of text versus the many forms previously required. We see it in our fulfillment centers across North America where we're rolling out Project Private Investigator, which uses a combination of generative AI and computer vision to uncover defects before products reach customers. We see it in how our generative AI is helping our customers discover new music and video. We see it in how it's making Alexa smarter. And we see it in how our custom silicon and services like SageMaker and Bedrock are helping both our internal teams and many thousands of external companies reinvent their customer experiences and businesses. We are investing a lot across the board in AI, and we'll keep doing so as we like what we're seeing and what we see ahead of us. We also continue to like the progress in Prime Video. Our storytelling is resonating with our hundreds of millions of monthly viewers worldwide, and the 62 Emmy nominations Amazon MGM Studios recently received is another supporting data point. We recently debuted titles like Fallout, the second most watched original title ever for Prime Video, The Idea of You, which attracted nearly 50 million viewers worldwide in the first two weeks on Prime Video, and Season 4, The Boys, which reached number one on Prime Video in 165 countries in its opening two weeks. And we continue to see momentum in live sports. We recently announced 11-year landmark deals with the NBA and the WNBA. When combined with our original films and shows, partner streaming services, licensed content, and rent or buy titles, Prime Video continues to evolve into the best destination for streaming video. And for Project Kuiper, our low-Earth orbit satellite constellation, we're accelerating satellite manufacturing at our facility in Kirkland, Washington. We've announced a distribution agreement with Vrio, who distributes direct TV Latin America and Sky Brazil to offer Project Kuiper's satellite broadband network to residential customers across seven countries in South America, and we continue to feel significant demand for the service from enterprise and government entities. We expect to start shipping production satellites late this year and continue to believe this could be a very large business for us. I could go on, but we'll stop here. There's a lot to feel optimistic about over the next several years and the team collectively remains focused on continuing to invent and deliver for our customers in the business. With that, I'll turn it over to Brian for a financial update. Brian Olsavsky : Thanks, Andy. Let's start with our top line financial results. Worldwide revenue was $148 billion, an 11% increase year-over-year, excluding the impact of foreign exchange. This equates to a $1 billion headwind from foreign exchange in the quarter, which is about $300 million higher than we'd anticipated in our Q2 guidance range. Worldwide operating income nearly doubled year-over-year to $14.7 billion, which was $700 million above the high end of our guidance range. Across all of our segments, we remain focused on managing costs in a way that allows us to continue innovating and investing in areas that we think could move the needle for our customers. Starting with the North American international segments, customers continue to respond positively to our focus on low prices, broad selection, and fast shipping offers. We delivered at our fastest speeds ever so far this year, which helps drive strength in areas like our everyday essentials. These include items like non-perishable foods, as well as health, beauty, and personal care items. And Prime members continue to increase their shopping frequency while growing their spend on Amazon. Overall unit sales grew 11% year-over-year, which is consistent with our growth rates in Q1 after you adjust for the approximately 100 basis point impact of leap year. North America segment revenue was $90 billion, an increase of 9% year-over-year. And international segment revenue was $31.7 billion, an increase of 10% year-over-year, excluding the impact of foreign exchange. North America segment operating income was $5.1 billion, an increase of $1.9 billion year-over-year. Operating margin was 5.6%, up 170 basis points year-over-year, and down 20 basis points quarter over quarter. If we look at profitability of the core North America stores business, we actually improved our margin again quarter-over-quarter in Q2. The overall North America segment operating margin decreased slightly due to increased Q2 spend in some of our investment areas, including Kuiper, where we're starting to manufacture satellites we'll launch into space in Q4. We saw improvements in our cost to serve, driven by our efforts to place inventory more regionally, closer to where our customers are. This resulted in more consolidated shipments, with higher units per box shipped. We also saw packages traveling shorter distances to customers, and this also led to better on-road productivity in our transportation network. Our international segment was profitable again in Q2, with operating income of $300 million, an improvement of $1.2 billion year-over-year. Operating margin was 0.9%, up 390 basis points year over year. This increase is primarily driven by our established countries, as we improve our cost structure with better inventory placement and more consolidated shipments. Additionally, our emerging countries continue to expand their customer offerings, leverage their cost structure, and invest in expanding prime benefits. We are pleased with the overall progress of these countries as they make strides on their respective paths to profitability. Advertising remains an important contributor to profitability in the North America and international segments, and we saw strong growth on an increasing larger revenue base this quarter. We continue to see opportunities that further expand our offering in areas that are driving growth today, like sponsored products, as well as newer areas, like Prime Video ads. Moving next to our AWS segment, revenue is $26.3 billion, an increase of 18.8% year-over-year, excluding the impact of foreign exchange. AWS now has an annualized revenue run rate of more than $105 billion. During the second quarter, we saw continued growth across both generative AI and non-generative AI workloads. We saw companies turn their attention to newer initiatives, bring more workloads to the cloud, restart or accelerate existing migrations from on-premises to the cloud, and tap into the power of generative AI. AWS operating income was $9.3 billion, an increase of $4 billion year-over-year. It's driven by our continued focus on cost control, including a measured pace of hiring. Additionally, AWS operating margin includes an approximately 200 basis point favorable impact from the change in the estimated useful life of our servers that we instituted in Q1. As we've long said, we expect AWS operating margins to fluctuate over time, driven in part by the level of investments we're making at any point in time. We remain focused on driving efficiencies across the business, which enables us to invest to support the strong growth we're seeing in AWS, including generative AI. Now let's turn our attention to capital investments. As a reminder, we define these as a combination of CapEx plus equipment finance leases. For the first half of the year, CapEx was $30.5 billion. Looking ahead to the rest of 2024, we expect capital investments to be higher in the second half of the year. The majority of the spend will be to support the growing need for AWS infrastructure as we continue to see strong demand in both generative AI and our non-generative AI workloads. For the third quarter, specifically, I'd highlight a few seasonal factors to keep in mind. First, we hosted another successful Prime Day in mid-July. It was our 10th Prime Day and was our largest ever. Prime members globally saved billions of dollars on deals across every product category. From a profitability perspective, we've historically seen a headwind to operating margin in Q3, driven by Prime Day deals, as well as the marketing spend surrounding the event. Additionally, in Q3, we also begin to ramp up our capacity to handle Q4 holiday volumes in our fulfillment network. And lastly, we expect an increase in digital content cost quarter-over-quarter from the return of our NFL Thursday Night Football. We remain heads down, focused on driving a better customer experience. We believe putting customers first is the only reliable way to create lasting value for our shareholders. With that, let's move on to your questions.
And our next question comes from the line of Brian Nowak with Morgan Stanley. Please proceed with your question. Brian Nowak : Thanks for the questions. I have two. So the first one I wanted to ask about in the second quarter, the retail gross margins that we're trying to do the monkey math, look a little weaker than expected. Was there any extra pressure on retail gross margins because of discounting? Or is that where Kuiper is? Or sort of how do we think about some of the drivers of retail gross margins in the quarter at shipping? And the second one, Andy, in the past, you talked about cost to serve improvement and sort of getting the North America margins back to pre-pandemic levels. Can you just remind us again sort of the internal philosophy about executing on that? Is there a time line to deliver on that? Sort of how are you sort of balancing showing that profitability improvement over the next couple of years versus pressing on new investments like Kuiper and perhaps reinvesting some of those profits over the next couple of years? Andy Jassy : Brian, let me start with the first question on North America margins. So if you look at the segment operating margins, we did decrease 20 basis points sequentially from Q1 to Q2. I'll remind you that we have - see the annual step-up in stock-based compensation at the end of Q1 each year, and that added about $1.8 billion of stock-based comp expense in Q2 versus Q1. So that's impacting to some extent, all three segments. But even with that stock-based comp step up, the stores part of the North America segment, increase the margin again last quarter. So we're continuing to see strong improvements in cost to serve as well as improvement in speed, added selection, better safety. So a lot of the key areas that we're hitting on are strong. What you're seeing for the segment is that some of our investment areas had a tick up in expenses and investment in Q2 versus Q1. And that's not unheard of. Q1 is usually the lightest investment quarter, things like Prime Video and devices have less investment going on in those quarters. But the one thing I'd point out, I think we mentioned it is Kuiper stepping up a bit in Q2 versus Q1 as we start to build satellites that we'll launch in Q3 and Q4 this year. And your second question, Brian, I continue and the team continues to believe that we have the opportunity to expand the margin in our stores business. And as I've said on a number of the calls that we've done, it's not going to happen in one quarter, it's not going to happen in one fell swoop, it's going to take work over a long period of time. But I think that one of the silver linings, if you will, about year and half ago in the ricochet of the pandemic and all the growth that we had and the cost to serve challenges that we had was, it really forced us to reevaluate everything in the network. And really, even our most closely felt beliefs over a long period of time. And what it did was unveiled a number of opportunities that we believe we have to keep driving cost to serve down. And the first one that you've seen play out over the last year or so has been the regionalization of the U.S. network. And I think one thing to remember about that is that while it's had even bigger impact than maybe we theorized when we first architected it, we're still not done fully honing it. There's a lot of ways that we continue to optimize that U.S. regionalization that we think will continue to bear lower cost to serve. But at the same time, we found a number of other areas where we believe we can take our cost down while also improving the customer experience. One of the great things about regionalization was it not only took our cost to serve down, but it meaningfully changed the speed with which we're able to get items to customers. And so we have a number of those other opportunities. Another example of that is regionalizing our inbound network, which is also going to lower our cost to serve and get items more close to end users and diminish the amount of time it takes to get them to customers. We have a number of things that we're working on that allow us to combine more units per box, which lowers our costs as well and a lot of customers like that better because it's better for the environment, having more units per box. So I think we have a lot of opportunities to continue to take down our cost to serve. And strategically and philosophically, just two other things as you were alluding to that question. I think that from our perspective, as we're able to take cost to serve down, it means that we're able to afford to have more selection that we're able to offer to customers. And there are a lot of lower ASP items there, average selling price items that we don't stock because they're not economic to stock with our current cost to serve. But as we work hard to make progress like we are on lowering our cost to serve, that allows us to add more selection. And we see this time in and time out that we -- when we add more selection, customers actually consider us for more of their purchases and spend more with us down the line. I think the other thing, too, I would tell you is that I don't see it as being binary in any way, nor have I really ever seen it this way in the history of the company. I've been here 27 years. But we don't think of it as we can either be investing or we can be working on trying to take our cost to serve down. We believe we can do both. If you think about the examples you gave, the stores business and the Kuiper business are -- they're just different people working on those businesses. So our stores team is going to continue to work really hard on expanding selection and keeping prices low and speeding up our delivery times and driving our cost to serve down while our Kuiper team is working on how to figure out how to help the 400 million to 500 million households around the world who don't have broadband connectivity get that connectivity and allow them to do a lot of the things we take for granted today with broadband connectivity. So they're not going to be binary. We're going to work on them both at the same time.