Amazon Web Services records revenue leap of 32%, declares $13.5bn profit for Q1’21

Zainab Iwayemi

Amazon Web Services, AWS, one of Amazon’s strongest-growing business segments witnessed a surge in revenue last year. Data by BuyShares shows that the growth continued this year as AWS generated cloud computing and hosting revenues of around $13.5 billion, representing a 32 per cent jump year-on-year in the first quarter of 2021.

‘As-a-service’ options are one of the most used ways for companies to utilize cloud computing. During the period under study, these services provide business organizations with access to computing power, software, as well as other cloud-related functions without the need for in-house hardware.

Before the pandemic, cloud computing revenues had been increasing significantly. However, the COVID-19 further accelerated the growth of the entire sector thus leaving companies across the globe to search for a way to secure business continuity amid the lockdown.

As contained in Amazon financial report, AWS, as the market leader saw a tremendous role in growth in the first quarter of 2019 with its quarterly revenue amounting to nearly $7.7 billion. This figure improved by 33 per cent over the next twelve months to 33 per cent year-on-year to $10.2 billion in first-quarter 2020. According to statistics, AWS quarterly revenue continued growing throughout 2020 and hit $12.7 billion in the last quarter of the year.

In the next three months, however, this figure increased by another $758 million with quarterly revenue rising to $13.5 billion in the first quarter of 2021. Amid the pandemic, AWS annual revenue jumped by 30 per cent rising from $35 billion in 2019 to $45.3 billion in 2020.

A report by Flexera State of the Cloud Report shows that 50 per cent of technical professionals from industries worldwide stated their organization was running a significant workload on AWS while another 30 per cent said they were using its apps to some extent and 13 per cent were either experimenting or planning to utilize them in 2021.

With 76 per cent of respondents running its applications, Microsoft’s Azure ranked as the second most popular cloud platform service while google cloud and oracle infrastructure cloud followed, with respective 49 per cent and 32 per cent share of respondents.