The Blockbuster Growth of Amazon's Cloud Business

The Blockbuster Growth of Amazon's Cloud Business
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Many people are surprised to hear that one of Amazon’s most successful, and most profitable operating segment, has nothing to do with online shopping.

In the past quarter, Amazon Web Services, the company’s cloud platform providing the technical backbone for countless online services you may use, accounted for 13 percent of Amazon’s net sales and almost 70 percent of the company’s operating profit. As the chart illustrates, AWS has been a major growth driver for Amazon recently.

Over the past five years, the company’s cloud business grew eightfold, lifting the e-commerce giant’s profits to levels that would be hard to achieve in its low-margin core business.