Amazon's Q3: $17.09B in revenue; shares climb in after-hours trading

With a quarter that included some major additions to its popular Kindle Fire tablet brand, Amazon reported third quarter earnings after the bell on Thursday.

The cloud giant reported a net loss of $41 million, or nine cents per share (statement). Once again, Amazon attributed the poor showing here to its assets involving flailing daily deals brand LivingSocial.

The EPS loss on a non-GAAP basis equaled nine cents per share on a revenue of $17.09 billion.

Wall Street was expecting a loss of nine cents per share on a revenue of $16.76 billion.

Thanks to making those goals, Amazon shares were up by nine percent initially in after-hours trading.

CEO Jeff Bezos, who took it upon himself to introduce the Kindle Fire HDX to the press for a hands-on demo last month, gushed about the quarter in prepared remarks:

It’s been a busy few months—we launched a new Paperwhite and new Kindle Fires to positive reviews and surprised people with the revolutionary Mayday button—average Mayday response times are just 11 seconds!

And that’s not all. In the last 90 days, our AWS team got back to work on a big government contract, we brought 8 million square feet of fulfillment center capacity online, deployed 1,382 Kiva robots in three FCs, provided a new venue for artists to reach customers, signed up millions of new Prime members, announced Kindle MatchBook, Login & Pay, and nine new original TV pilots, joined the Code.org coalition, acquired TenMarks—a company that helps kids with math, scored a win for customers who want to use Kindles on airplanes even during takeoff and landing (also, a big hat tip to Nick Bilton on that one), began hiring and training 70,000 new U.S. FC employees to help serve customers this holiday season, and saw the Kindle Million Club grow to include 14 KDP authors.

With the busiest shopping time of the year quickly approaching, Wall Street expects a rebound from Amazon during the fourth quarter. Analysts want the e-commerce titan to deliver earnings of approximately 72 cents per share on a revenue of $25.89 billion.

Amazon responded with a revenue guidance range of $23.5 billion to $26.5 billion.

Along with the holiday season and all the madness that entails, Amazon is also expected to make some major announcements surrounding its cloud services business at the company's second annual re:Invent summit in Las Vegas in November.

The Seattle-headquartered operation typically doesn't break out a lot of sales figures by department, but it didn't shy away from boasting plenty of releases across its diverse portfolio either.

Aside from the aforementioned Kindle Fire updates, here's a closer look at the highlights from Amazon's Q3:

• Amazon Web Services was upgraded with more than a dozen new features to its relational and NoSQL database services.
• The AWS customer base now includes more than 2,400 education institutions and 600 government agencies, including this recent addition: the U.S. Federal Drug Administration.
• Opened the Mexico Kindle Store with more than two million titles -- hundreds of thousands of which are exclusive. More than 70,000 are in Spanish.
• Launched Appstore Developer Select, an incentive program for developers who optimize their apps and games for Amazon's Appstore and the Android-based Fire OS for the Kindle Fire tablet series
• Launched Login and Pay with Amazon, a new one-click payments feature for external retail sites and online merchants that goes tête–à–tête with PayPal
• Announced it will be adding more than 70,000 full-time seasonal jobs across its U.S. fulfillment centers this holiday season -- roughly doubling the number of temp workers Amazon employed during Q4 last year