Amazon has reported its second straight quarter of $100bn-plus sales, comfortably beating Wall Street’s targets as it continues to reap the rewards of pandemic conditions.

Net sales of $108.5bn in the first three months of the year helped the company achieve a net income of $8.1bn, up by more than 220 per cent on the same period in 2020.

Almost half of its operating income — $4.2bn — came via its cloud division, AWS, which experienced a continued boost from the shift to homeworking, with year-on-year revenue growth of 32 per cent.

Revenues from company’s advertising business, seen as a big new profit centre, rose 77 per cent year-on-year, to $6.9bn, as Amazon continued to leverage its position as the starting point for millions of daily product searches.

Its stock price rose by about 3 per cent in after-hours trading to a record above $3,590.

In its guidance, Amazon said it expected its elevated sales to continue, even as communities begin to reopen, predicting between $110bn and $116bn in revenue from this current quarter.

The company said it expected net income to come in between $4.5bn and $8.0bn, factoring in $1.5bn in spending related to Covid-19 measures in its logistics network.