News
AWS Surpasses Wall Street Estimates in Q4 Earnings
Amazon Web Services (AWS) reached new heights in its fiscal fourth quarter, reporting $7.4 billion in revenue as part of Thursday's earnings release.
That's an increase of 11.2% from the previous quarter, when the cloud giant earned $6.7 billion.
AWS' Q4 revenue was just north of analyst estimates of $7.3 billion.
Operating income for the quarter-ended Dec. 31 was $2.2 billion, up by 4.8% from Q3 and by 60.8% from last year's Q4.
Parent company Amazon.com reported $72.4 billion in revenue, edging past Wall Street estimates of $71.9 billion.
By far, AWS was the retail giant's fastest-growing segment, increasing revenue by 45.3% year-over-year. By comparison, Amazon.com's International retail segment grew by 15.5% year-over-year, and the North America retail segment by 18.3%.
AWS accounted for 10.3% of Amazon.com's total sales for the quarter.
AWS' closest competitor in the cloud, Microsoft, also reported its earnings this week. While Microsoft doesn't directly break out Azure revenues in its earnings reports, it did reveal that Azure grew by 76% in the most recent fiscal quarter.
By market share, however, AWS still dwarfs Azure; data gathered by market researcher Synergy in late 2018 put AWS' market share at about 34%, more than double Azure's share of 15%.
For the full fiscal year of 2018, AWS earned $25.7 billion in revenue.
Amazon.com executives credited several product milestones in Q4 for propelling AWS' growth, including advances in processing power with the Inferentia and Graviton chips, as well as the debut of new blockchain and machine learning technologies.