Amazon released earnings results for its 2018 fiscal year on Jan. 31, posting 31 percent growth in net sales.
Five things to know about the Seattle-based tech giant's performance:
1. The company posted $232.9 billion in net sales for the year, up 31 percent from $177.9 billion it reported during 2017.
2. Product sales accounted for most of Amazon's earnings in 2018 ($141.9 billion), with the remaining $91 billion attributed to services sales. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos credited the company's voice assistant, Alexa, with driving product sales.
"Alexa was very busy during her holiday season," he said in a news release. "Echo Dot was the best-selling item across all products on Amazon globally, and customers purchased millions more devices from the Echo family compared to last year. The number of research scientists working on Alexa has more than doubled in the past year, and the results of the team's hard work are clear."
3. Amazon's cloud computing arm, Amazon Web Services, brought in $25.7 billion in net sales during 2018, up 47 percent from $17.5 billion in 2017.
4. The company posted $12.4 billion in operating income in 2018, up more than 200 percent from $4.1 billion the company reported one year prior.
5. Amazon officials expect the company's net sales for the first quarter of 2019 will be in the range of $56 billion to $60 billion, compared to the $51 billion it reported for the first quarter of 2018.