AWS India reseller’s revenue soars higher in FY17 as cloud biz expands

Amazon Internet Services Pvt. Ltd, the Indian reseller of Amazon Web Services, reported a rapid growth in revenue for the year through March 2017 as demand for its cloud computing services rose.

Net sales jumped almost four-fold to Rs 397.4 crore from Rs 113.4 crore the year before, according to the company’s regulatory filings sourced through VCCEdge, the data research arm of VCCircle.

Revenue from its main cloud services division rose to Rs 345.3 crore from Rs 89.2 crore. Revenue from marketing services increased to Rs 52.1 crore from Rs 24.2 crore.

Amazon Internet Services is the local reseller of AWS and was incorporated in 2011. Revenue from India makes up a very small part of AWS’ global sales. AWS garnered $5.11 billion in revenue for its fiscal fourth quarter ended 31 December 2017 and $17.46 billion in the entire 2017.

Amazon Internet also said its revenue from continuing operations increased from about $307 million in 2016 to $406 million in 2017. “The sales growth primarily reflects increased custom usage of cloud-related services, partially offset by pricing changes,” it said in its annual report.

The company reported a wider net loss of Rs 10.9 crore for 2016-17 from Rs 1.7 crore the year before, as total costs increased to Rs 390 crore from Rs 109.2 crore.

Also, the company said it had sold its data services business for Rs 699 crore in December 2016 to group firm Amazon Data Services India Pvt. Ltd. The company realised a gain of Rs 251.3 crore on the sale.

This business operated data centres to provide data services to AWS. In July last year, Amazon.com Inc infused Rs 1,381.6 crore ($214.6 million) into Amazon Data Services.

AWS competes with the likes of Microsoft, IBM and Google in the cloud services market. Microsoft’s cloud platform is seen as the more popular option for enterprises due to easy deployment, globally. The Satya Nadella-led company topped Jeff Bezos-led Amazon’s cloud services arm in global revenue for the quarter ended December and through 2017.