Amazon has been announcing its entry into every industry under the sun lately—or so it seems—but the aggressive expansion has, until now, not immediately shown the company a solid profit. However, Amazon ended the quarter on a (relatively) good note according to its financial statement released on Thursday [PDF], with a $214 million net income for the company's fourth fiscal quarter of 2014.

Prior to this quarter, Amazon reported three losing quarters out of four, and those losses showed up in the company's earnings report, reflecting a loss of $241 million in 2014 overall, compared to a net gain of $274 million in 2013.

Still, the company reported a 20 percent increase in net sales after increasing the price of Amazon Prime memberships in March, proving that Amazon Prime memberships are relatively inelastic. “[O]n a base of tens of millions, worldwide paid [Prime] membership grew 53 percent last year—50 percent in the US and even a bit faster outside the US,” said Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos wrote in a statement. In an investor's conference call after the release of the earnings, an Amazon executive said that Prime pays off well for the company. Amazon sees “a very sizable” increase in customer purchasing after that customer buys a Prime subscription. “We're seeing them purchasing a lot more from us,” he said, adding that the service is almost 10 years old and still growing strongly.

The biggest highlight may have been Amazon Web Services, which reported “usage growth close to 90 percent year-over-year for the fourth quarter,” as well as over a million active customers. Although Amazon doesn't break out its profits and losses on AWS, an Amazon executive said that “our plan is to start breaking it out as of Q1 of next year” because it's such a huge section of growth.

Despite Amazon's improving outlook, vague and possibly dismal news for Amazon's Fire Phone was reported. “I don't have a call out for the Fire Phone,” an Amazon executive said. “We [had] a little over in $80 million in inventory in Q3 and we'll continue to sell through that in Q4.”

Amazon didn't have too much to say about Amazon WorkMail, the company's recently announced cloud-based business e-mail service that it announced earlier this week, nor did it have much to say about Amazon Entertainment Studios, which launched an initiative this month to do theatrical releases for 12 feature films that it would be commissioning over the next year.

As of this writing, Amazon is up 12 percent in after-hours trading.