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> It now has annual revenues in the $8bn range, which is bigger than Amazon’s entire retail operation If Amazon's total revenue (for 2014) was just shy of $90B

• boundlessdreamz 11y ago
  I remember reading that "operating income" of AWS is greater than the retail arm
  • adventured 11y ago
    In the most recent quarter it essentially matched the retail side of Amazon's North America business on operating income. In North America Amazon generated $528m in operating income. AWS generated $521m. AWS is growing extremely fast of course (78% sales growth year over year for the quarter). In three years it'll probably be spitting off $4 to $5 billion per year in operating income.
• dazc 11y ago
  No idea where they got their figures from but maybe the shortfall is the difference between pure retail and other stuff, like order fulfillment, advertising, seller fees, etc?
  • adventured 11y ago
    It's just really bad reporting. The sales figure Amazon reports, is its share of revenue and does not include the merchandise value of what its merchants sell. You can safely bet that Amazon's retail dollar keep, is about eight times the size of AWS right now (excluding their hardware and digital goods business). Amazon handles about 40% of dollar figure sales of all merchandise on its site (and 45% of all units sold). Amazon breaks out the units sold figure, but the dollar figure is a ballpark guess from analysts that track Amazon. You can roughly double their sales to get the total merchandise value of goods moving across their retail site.