Associated Press
- Amazon Web Services reported $11.6 billion in revenue for the third quarter, up about 29% from the same quarter last year.
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Amazon reported $11.6 billion in quarterly revenue for the company’s market-leading Amazon Web Services cloud business, up nearly 29% from the same quarter last year.
AWS continued to be a profit-driver for Amazon, accounting for more than $3.5 billion of Amazon’s nearly $6.2 billion in operating income for the third-quarter.
The sales growth for AWS is in line with analyst expectations. AWS growth has been slowing for years (from a high of 46% growth in the fourth quarter of 2018), but analysts generally chalk it up to law of large numbers. Basically, AWS’ growing revenue base makes it harder to demonstrate large growth percentages every quarter.
It’s hard to know exactly how much AWS revenue compares to runner-up Microsoft Azure because Microsoft doesn’t report revenue for the business.
Microsoft instead reports revenue for its so-called “commercial cloud,” which includes not only Azure, but cloud-based software like Office 365. Microsoft on Tuesday said the business reached $15.2 billion in sales for its fiscal first quarter, up 31% compared with the same quarter last year, and this summer it surpassed $50 billion in annual commercial cloud revenue.
Revenue for Microsoft's Azure cloud platform is unknown. Microsoft doesn't break out revenue figures for Azure, and only shares the percentage by which it grew from the same period of the year before. In its first quarter, that figure was 48%. Two analysts estimated Azure makes up 17% of Microsoft revenue, which would be $6.3 billion of the $37.2 billion in Q1 revenue Microsoft reported this week.
Google, which lags behind both Amazon and Microsoft in the cloud, reported $3.4 billion in Q3 revenue, up about 45% year-over-year (though the way it reports revenue also doesn't offer an apples-to-apples comparison).
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