In disclosing its financial results for the first quarter of this year today, ecommerce company Amazon said that its Amazon Web Services (AWS) public cloud business brought in $890 million in operating income on $3.66 billion in revenue during the quarter.
That means AWS revenue was up 42 percent year over year. For context, that’s down considerably from the 64 percent revenue growth figure from a year ago. AWS revenue growth has fallen for the past seven quarters now.
Above: AWS revenue growth charted over the years.
As an entire company, Amazon captured $724 million in net income, or $1.48 in earnings per diluted share (EPS), on $35.7 billion in revenue. Analysts were expecting $1.12 per share on $35.6 billion in revenue.
Established in 2006, AWS is the biggest provider of computing, storage, and networking infrastructure that companies can rent out and pay for based on how much they use. Public clouds tailing AWS include Microsoft Azure and the Google Cloud Platform. Other competitors include IBM, Oracle, Alibaba, and Tencent. AWS seeks to maintain its lead by regularly coming out with new services, expanding its geographical reach, and keeping its underlying computing gear up to date. Amazon says AWS has “millions of active customers.”
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In the first quarter AWS introduced the videoconferencing service Amazon Chime, acquired media rendering company Thinkbox Software, and faced a major outage affecting its widely used S3 storage service.
Also Snap, the company behind messaging app Snapchat, disclosed that it will spend $1 billion on AWS infrastructure through 2021 — although Snap will spend double that on Google’s public cloud.
AWS had $2.77 billion in operating expenses for the quarter, up from $1.86 billion a year earlier, according to today’s earnings statement.
Amazon stock was up more than 4 percent in after-hours trading.
