Amazon cloud revenue jumps 45 percent in fourth quarter

Amazon Web Services CEO Andy Jassy speaks at the AWS re: Invent 2017 conference in Las Vegas.

Amazon's cloud business generated more revenue than expected in the fourth quarter, with sales up 45 percent.

The financial results reinforce the fact that Amazon Web Services has become an ATM for its parent company, while Alibaba, Google, IBM, Microsoft and Oracle are all trying to catch up.

AWS had sales of $ 5.11 billion in the quarter and $ 17.46 billion in 2017, Amazon said in its quarterly results on Thursday. Analysts expect an average of $ 4.97 billion, according to FactSet.

AWS now has more than $ 20 billion in revenue, Financial Director Brian Olsavsky told Amazon's conference call with analysts after the release of the results.

Operating profit at AWS increased to $ 1.35 billion for the quarter, in addition to FactSet's estimate of $ 1.27 billion.


Nearly a dozen years after becoming available, AWS has made a significant contribution to the parent company. In the fourth quarter of 2014, nearly 5% of Amazon's sales came from AWS. In the fourth quarter of 2017, this figure was approximately 8.5%. Throughout 2017, approximately 10% of Amazon's sales come from AWS.

"There are few corporate franchises that operate with an annual execution rate of $ 20 billion and yet generate a high growth rate of more than 40%," KeyBanc analysts Edward Yruma wrote in a statement. commentary of January 28th.

But in addition to expanding its sales capacity, AWS has also been progressively providing more and more business revenue to Amazon, which provides capital for additional investments, particularly outside of North America. In the fourth quarter, AWS operating profit was more than 60% of operating profit for the entire Amazon.

During the quarter, AWS launched translation and transcription services, unveiled a camera for developers capable of performing artificial intelligence calculations, and announced data centers for US intelligence only. In November, AWS CEO Andy Jassy boasted that public cloud customers now offer more than 100 services.