Amazon is moving its Prime Day sale to the second quarter.
The company announced the shift in Prime Day timing on its first quarter earnings conference call. On a call with press, Amazon executives said Prime Day will land in June.
Amazon CFO Brian Olsavsky said:
We are excited to announce that we will hold the 2-day savings event during the second quarter. Prime Day is also a great opportunity for our selling partners to reach more customers and will make supporting small businesses a big focus again this year. We’ll have more to share on Prime Day, including the event dates a bit later this quarter.
The comments were largely overshadowed by the other moving parts in Amazon’s quarter. Notably, Amazon Web Services saw revenue growth accelerate. AWS is now on a $54 billion annual revenue run rate.
Twitch growth was also strong.
But analysts did come back around to Prime Day, which was delayed into the fourth quarter in 2020, but has traditionally been held in the third quarter.
Olsavsky said Amazon’s guidance for the second quarter includes Prime Day but wouldn’t quantify more. He said:
On the timing, last year, we had intended to hold Prime Day earlier. We — there are a number of factors, the Olympics, which are still out there this year. In fact, in some — many areas, July is a big vacation month. So, it might be better to have — for customers, sellers and vendors to experiment with a different time period. We experimented the other way, obviously, in 2020 by moving it into October, but we believe that it might be a better timing later in Q2. So that’s what we’re testing this year.
Amazon said it expects second quarter revenue to be between $110 billion and $116 billion with operating income between $4.5 billion and $8 billion.
