AWS first-quarter revenue surges 41% to $7.69 bn

Jeff Bezos-led Amazon’s cloud services division, Amazon Web Services (AWS), has reported a 41% increase in revenue for its first quarter this year to reach $7.69 billion.

The company had reported revenue of $5.44 billion for the same period last year. 

The surge in cloud revenue also boosted Amazon’s first-quarter revenue; AWS accounted for 13% of the total sales. Last quarter, AWS had accounted for 10% of total revenue for Amazon.

Amazon has reported total revenue of $59.7 billion for the first quarter compared to $51 billion for the corresponding period last year. Net income for the company stood at $3.6 billion against $1.6 billion in the same period last year.

On Thursday, Windows maker Microsoft had reported that strong momentum in the cloud business had helped the company increase its third-quarter revenue by 14% to reach $30.6 billion.

Chief financial officer Amy Hood said demand for the company's cloud offerings drove commercial cloud revenue 41% higher to $9.6 billion during the quarter. Commercial cloud revenue includes Azure services, LinkedIn and Office 365.

Microsoft had reported revenue of $26.8 billion in the corresponding period last fiscal year. Net profit for the company surged 19% to $8.8 billion for the quarter ended March from $7.4 billion a year earlier.  

Microsoft follows a July-June fiscal year while Amazon follows the January-December format. 

Interestingly, both the companies are vying for a $10 billion defence contract in the US.