Despite the fact that many enterprises around the globe are relying on the cloud during the COVID-19 pandemics, cloud market leader Amazon Web Services has seen its lowest year-overyear growth.
Amazon.com, the parent company, reported its earnings for its fiscal 2nd quarter on Thursday. AWS reported $10.8 billion in revenue for the quarter that ended June 30, which was below Wall Street’s estimate of $11 billion. Operating income was $3.4 Billion, which is higher than the estimates of $3 Billion.
The AWS revenue for this period increased by approximately 5.8% over the prior quarter and by 29% over last year’s same quarter. This is the lowest year-overyear increase in cloud unit revenue since Amazon.com started reporting AWS revenues separately.
AWS’s market dominance has not been affected by AWS’ slow growth in recent years. Analysts estimate that AWS holds one-third of global cloud infrastructure services market. This is more than its three closest competitors — including No. 2 Microsoft Azure — combined.
This quarter is notable because AWS, which is normally the fastest-growing business unit of Amazon.com, has fallen to last, behind strong growth for the North America (33% year over the year) and International (38%). This is likely due to the COVID-19 pandemic, which drove online retail sales skyward when brick-and-mortar shops were forced to close.
Amazon.com’s total revenue for the quarter was $88.9billion. This is 40% more than the $81.3billion estimate.
Microsoft, which is the closest competitor to AWS (though by a small margin), released its latest financial report last Wednesday. Like AWS, Azure cloud platform saw a slower growth rate than AWS’s, rising by 47%, compared to 59% the previous quarter.
