What To Expect From AWS’ First Ever Public Financial Results

On April 23, Amazon will be announcing its first quarter financial results for the year, but this time around, something very different is happening. For the first time in its nine-year history, financial details about Amazon’s public cloud business, Amazon Web Services (AWS), will be included in the report.

Before now, Amazon Web Services’ results have been hidden under an “other” heading, despite the business making a huge chunk of Amazon’s revenue. In the previous quarter, the “other” section reported $1.67 billion (£1.1bn) in revenue, a 43 percent rise year-over-year. $1.02 billion (£700m) of this “other” revenue came from North America.

Appropriate

During the earnings call, Amazon will be revealing exactly how much revenue Amazon Web Services is generating. Amazon’s CFO Tom Szkutak has said: “We expect to change our reportable segments to report North America, international and Amazon Web Services, beginning with first quarter of 2015.

“In terms of AWS, we just think it’s an appropriate way to look at our business for 2015. And so our plan is to separating it out as of Q1 of this year.”

It looks as though analysts in-the-know are expecting Amazon to haul in a revenue of $22.4 billion (£15bn), with AWS playing a big part in that. AWS has recently come into its own in some regards of public cloud computing, as well as dominating enterprise cloud adoption. Recent 451 Research studies show that AWS is the leader in Infrastructure-as-a-Service adoption in the enterprise world. AWS holds 57 percent of all IaaS customers. Furthermore, Amazon claimed that AWS usage rocketed almost 90 percent year-over-year during the fourth quarter of its last financial year, as well as hitting the one million customer mark.

It’s about time the AWS behemoth exposed the truth about its earnings. There may be few surprises, but what we will get is the ability to compare and scrutinise its performance against the main public cloud competitors Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. Deutsche Bank experts are expecting AWS’ fiscal year revenues to hit around $6 billion (£4bn), whilst Azure’s to reach between $500 (£332) and $700 (£465) million.

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