Amazon Web Services’ standards were that Thursday’s fourth quarter earnings report for Amazon.com was a rare financial failure, despite record-high revenues.
AWS, the market leader in public cloud markets by a large margin, has steadily increased its revenues every earnings report since Amazon.com started breaking it out as a separate line in the first quarter fiscal 2015. The Q4 FY2016 earnings report showed that AWS had raked in $3.5 Billion in revenue, an increase of 9.4% over the previous quarter.
However, revenue growth year-over-year was 47%, the slowest in its history. Analyst estimates of $3.6 billion for AWS revenues for the quarter were just missed by AWS revenues.
Profits increased from $861 Million in Q3 to $926 Million in Q4, but only 61% growth year-over-year — a snail’s pace when you consider previous quarters’ triple-digit operating revenue growth.
Despite signs of a slowdown, AWS outperformed Amazon.com’s North America or International retail segments. AWS’s revenues grew by only 22% and 23% respectively year-over-year.
AWS reported operating income of $3.1 million and earned $12.2 billion in total revenue for the fiscal year. This is a 55% increase over FY2015. AWS accounted for 9% of Amazon.com’s total revenue for the year.
Amazon.com executives highlighted the growth of AWS services, infrastructure, and customers in Thursday’s earnings release, despite the unit’s slow growth.
“With millions of customers, AWS continues its growth, and enterprise customers have committed tens of thousands to migrating to AWS.” The company stated in a press release that it has already moved over 5,000 servers to AWS while transforming its technology infrastructure on AWS.
AWS has significantly increased its global footprint over the past year through the launch of 11 new availability areas in five regions, including Canada, South Korea, and the United Kingdom. 2017 will see five more availability zones, split between Paris and China.
Q4 saw the launch 308 “significant new features and services” in AWS. Many of these, such as the Rekognition and Polly AI solutions; the Athena query service; and the expanded range of Snowball migration services, were showcased at last fall’s re-Invent conference.
AWS launched 1,017 new services total in 2016, according to the company. The Database Migration Service was one of these services, and it became generally available in March. It has already performed over 18,000 migrations.
Amazon.com’s total revenue for the period was $43.7 billion, which is less than Wall Street’s $44.7 billion estimate. However, the earnings per share of Amazon.com at $1.54 was $0.20 higher than expected. The company’s operating income was $1.3 billion.