When Amazon reported its fourth quarter earnings, many of us were keen on seeing just how its cloud division AWS fared after a strong third quarter. Last week the ecommerce giant reported Amazon Web Services (AWS) which is its public cloud service generated $926m in income on a $3.35b revenue in the fourth quarter of 2016. The figure is up 47 percent year on year. The third quarter of last year saw AWS rake in a revenue of $3.23b versus $3.17b expected by analysts and compared to the fourth quarter, the growth is consistent compared to the $2.88b revenue in the second quarter of 2016.
But much of that revenue went in operating expenditure as the company reported $2.43b in expenses in its public cloud services division.
Just as its competitors Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, they have used price cuts as a way of attracting more users but as it stands today, Amazon still leads the public cloud space by a good margin.
