Amazon.com Breaks Out AWS Cloud Revenues for the First Time in Q1 Report

Amazon.com (AMZN)’s quarterly earnings announcement today featured something that cloud computing watchers have been awaiting for quite some time. The company broke out its cloud computing AWS revenues for the first time for the quarter ended March 31, 2015. Amazon also provided AWS breakouts by quarter for all of 2014 and an annual AWS breakout for 2013. Here are the details.

For Q1 2015, Amazon reported AWS net sales of $1.566 billion a 49 percent increase over the same quarter a year ago. Amazon also broke out AWS net sales for the four quarters of 2014, and the percentage increase for each of them over the previous year’s quarter. Here they are:

Q1 2014
net sales: $1.050 billion, a 69 percent increase,
operating expenses, $805 million
operating income, $245 million

Q2 2014
net sales: $1.005 billion, a 43 percent increase
operating expenses, $928 million
operating income, $77 million

Q3 2014
net sales: $1.169 billion, a 43 percent increase
operating expenses, $1.071 billion
operating income, $98 million

Q4 2014
net sales: $1.420 billion, a 47 percent increase
operating expenses, $1.180 billion
operating income, $240 million.

For the full year ended 2014, AWS had net sales of $4.644 billion, reporting segment operating expenses of $3.984 billion for a segment operating income of $660 million.

For the full year ended 2013, AWS had net sales of $3.108 billion, reporting segment operating expenses of $2.435 billion and segment operating income of $673 million.

Amazon.com’s total net sales for Q1

Just to frame those quarterly amounts for you, Amazon’s total net sales for Q1 grew to $22.72 billion, a 15 percent increase over the same period a year ago. Operating income increased to $255 million in Q1, up 74 percent from last year’s first quarter. 

Net loss was $57 million in the first quarter, or 12 cents per diluted share, compared with net income of $108 million, or $0.23 per diluted share, in first quarter 2014.

Bezos talks AWS growth

“Amazon Web Services is a $5 billion business and still growing fast — in fact it’s accelerating,” said Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com, in a prepared statement.

AWS Premiere Partner and managed cloud services provider Cloudnexa CEO Joel Davne said that those who label infrastructure as a service (IaaS) as a commodity are wrong.  “Today’s blockbuster earnings are further evidence of AWS’ cloud domination,” he said. “…[Amazon continues] to innovate at warp speed with Amazon Elastic File System and Amazon Machine Learning services announced earlier this month. ”

Cloudnexa’s vNOC

Earlier this month Cloudnexa announced the general availability of its next generation vNOC cloud management platform which it said allows customers to automate and consolidate management of all their cloud environments on a single view with real-time reporting. The company made the announcement in conjunction with the AWS Summit on April 9.