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Amazon Reveals AWS Cloud Earnings for First Time
Amazon.com Inc. broke out revenue from its cloud business for the first time on Thursday, when it announced its first-quarter earnings report.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) recorded $1.57 billion in revenue for the quarter ended March 31, up 49% from the year-ago period. That would give it a run rate of over $6 billion, roughly on par with analyst estimates.
Operating income for AWS was $265 million, up from $245 million year-over-year.
This is the first earnings report from Amazon.com that explicitly breaks out financial information about AWS. In previous reports, AWS revenue had been thrown under the "North America, Other" category, which included much smaller revenue from credit cards and advertising. That category earned $1.67 billion in revenue in Q4 2014, and $5.39 billion in total for 2014.
"Amazon Web Services is a $5 billion business and still growing fast -- in fact it's accelerating," said Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos in a prepared statement on Thursday.
The new AWS segment "consists of amounts earned from sales of compute, storage, database, and other AWS service offerings for start-ups, enterprises, government agencies, and academic institutions," Amazon.com said in its press release. The company has two other reporting categories: "North America" and "International."
The company has previously touted AWS as having over 1 million active users, with usage growing year over year at a consistent 90% clip.
Amazon.com counted a number of AWS product launches as highlights of the past quarter, including unlimited cloud storage via Amazon Cloud Drive, Amazon Machine Learning, a new marketplace for desktop apps, and developer tools such as AWS Lambda and the EC2 Container Service.
Overall, Amazon.com just beat analyst expectations for the quarter, with revenue at $22.72 billion, up 15% from the year-ago period. Operating income for the company was $255 million, up 74% year-over-year.
The company reported a net loss of $57 million on $0.12 per share.