Amazon's India cloud business triples FY18 revenue, turns a profit

Amazon Internet Services Pvt. Ltd, which offers cloud services in India, reported a three-fold jump in revenue for the year through March 2018 and swung to a profit.

The Indian reseller of Amazon Web Services, the cloud computing arm of e-commerce giant Amazon.com Inc., posted revenue from operations of Rs 1,206 crore for 2017-18 compared with Rs 397.4 crore the year before. Other income climbed to Rs 29.4 crore from Rs 13.7 crore.

Amazon Internet posted a net profit from continuing operations of Rs 28.5 crore compared with a loss of Rs 10.9 crore the year before, according to regulatory filings with the Registrar of Companies.

The company had posted a profit of Rs 176.2 crore for 2016-17 after accounting for gains from operations that were later discontinued. Last year, the company had sold its data services business for Rs 699 crore in December 2016 to group firm Amazon Data Services India Pvt. Ltd. The company recorded a gain of Rs 251.3 crore on the sale. This business operated data centres to provide data services to AWS. 

Amazon Internet's total expenditure for 2017-18 was Rs 1,172.9 crore, up from Rs 417.4 crore the previous year.

The company said the sales growth primarily reflects increased custom usage of cloud-related services, partially offset by pricing changes.
AWS is the largest public cloud infrastructure provider in the world and the increase in its India revenue shows the company's dominance in India, where it competes with Microsoft, Google, IBM, Alibaba and Tencent.

All these companies claim India is embarking on a digital transformation journey and is opening up its cloud market with nearly 80% of the market remaining untapped. Several of them have forged alliances and have acquired companies to get an edge over the other.

A few recent moves include AWS tying up with VMware, Microsoft's partnership with Infosys and IBM's acquisition of open-source enterprise software company Red Hat for $34 billion.