For the first time in Amazon's history, its online marketplace and physical store sales represented less than half of its total revenue as the company's cloud computing division saw some of its best growth.
Amazon.com Inc. (Nasdaq: AMZN) reported over $110 billion in revenue, a 15% increase, for its fiscal third quarter ending Sept. 30, with a quarterly profit that plummeted due to increased spending. The Seattle company's overall growth didn't match the pace it set during the Covid-19 pandemic, but the more profitable sides of its business, cloud computing and advertising, had significant gains.
Amazon Web Services pulled in $16.1 billion, a 39% increase from last year, giving the cloud computing division its fastest growth since 2019. AWS had a profit of $4.8 billion.
On an earnings call with investors, Chief Financial OfficerBrian Olsavskysaid the rapid growth was a mix of customers moving to cloud-based infrastructure during the pandemic and suppressed spending in 2020.
Other tech giants are seeing their revenue grow and profits buoyed by cloud computing divisions. An increasing share of Google's revenue is from Google Cloud, and most of Microsoft's $20 billion in profit this quarter was from its Azure and Office 365 products.
Amazon's third business segment, titled "other" in earnings reports, is mostly its advertising business, which had $8 billion in revenue.
"Amazon Advertising continues to grow quickly, representing the significant majority of other revenue, which grew 49% year over year in Q3," Olsavsky said.
In response to an analyst, Olsavsky said concerns in the supply chain weren't affecting ad growth.