• by Sarah Mahoney  @mahoney_sarah, October 26, 2023

Thanks to the appeal of increasingly speedy delivery and robust gains in advertising sales, Amazon gave investors plenty to smile about in its third-quarter financial report.

Net sales increased 13% to $143.1 billion, compared with $127.1 billion in the third quarter of last year, beating expectations. And ad sales surged 26% to $12.06 billion. Revenues at AWS, the cloud-computing division, advanced 12% to $23.06 billion, slightly less than observers expected. Net income came in at $9.88 billion, up sharply from $2.87 billion in the year-ago period.

“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,” said Andy Jassy, Amazon’s chief executive officer, in the release.

Jassy also offered some details on the success of Amazon's recent Prime Big Deal Days, with Prime members in 19 countries saving more than $1 billion on millions of deals. U.S. Prime members bought 25 million items with same-day or next-day delivery on the first day of the two-day event.

The financial announcement also called out gains in healthcare. Those include the expansion of the Amazon Clinic virtual health care marketplace, which can now treat 35 conditions and provide 60-minute delivery of medications through Amazon Pharmacy using Prime Air drones in College Station, Texas. Amazon is also currently partnering with Blue Shield of California, and in 2025, will begin free home delivery of prescriptions to 4.8 million Blue Shield of California members.

The company also gave itself a chest bump for its results from "Thursday Night Football," now available only on Prime Video. The season opener drew 15.1 million viewers  For the season’s first six games, "TNF" averaged 12.9 million viewers, an increase of 25% from last year. And in good news for advertisers, Amazon says the average age of its football fans is 47, seven years younger than the median age of those watching the NFL on linear networks.

For the coming quarter, the company expects sales between $160 billion and $167 billion, representing a gain of between 7% and 12%, compared with the fourth quarter of last year.