Amazon has had a solid quarter. Sales are rising, profits are rising even more, and Amazon Web Services plays a major role in this.
In the fourth quarter of 2021, Amazon had revenue of $137.4 billion, an increase of nine percent year-over-year. Net profit rose to $14.3 billion, nearly doubling from $7.2 billion a year earlier.
For the full year 2021, Amazon is tapping into net sales of $469.8 billion, an increase of 22 percent. Operating profit is $24.9 billion, and net profit is $33.4 billion. A year earlier, this was still 21.3 billion dollars.
Amazon Web Services, the company’s cloud division, had net revenues of $17.8 billion, up 40 percent from the last quarter of 2020. Operating profit rose to $5.3 billion, or 37 percent more than a year ago.
CNBC notes that AWS makes up about 13 percent of the Amazon conglomerate but accounts for 153 percent of operating profit. Of course, that’s not mathematically correct (AWS’s profit is just over a third of Amazon’s total net profit). Still, CNBC comes to that conclusion because some parts of Amazon are running losses that AWS is making up for.
Furthermore, the business channel reasons that AWS is doing well despite the regular outages in the past quarter. But that also makes no sense. After all, migrating from a cloud partner is a process that can take months. So even if the breakdowns lead to great dissatisfaction, the effect will not be noticeable until later this year at the earliest.
What is true is that AWS remains by far the largest cloud provider and was also able to win several notable customers last quarter. For example, Meta, the former Facebook, will appoint AWS as a long-term partner in AI research. In addition, technology exchange Nasdaq migrates to AWS and Best Buy, Under Armour, Adidas and United Airlines also have AWS as their preferred cloud provider.