AWS’s sales up almost 50% year-on-year in second quarter

Amazon Web Services (AWS) continues to grow rapidly, achieving a near-50% increase in sales for the second quarter of 2018 compared with the same period last year.

Its net sales rose by 48.9% year-on-year to $6.1bn for the three months ending 30 June, which was a 12.2% increase on the previous quarter’s figure of $5.4bn.

Operating income jumped by 79.3% to $1.6bn compared with last year’s second quarter, and was 17.3% up on the 2018 first quarter.

The cloud giant announced several new customers during the latest quarter, including Ryanair, which has made a major commitment to move its systems to AWS.

The airline said it would be closing down most of its datacentres in the next few years as it moves to Amazon’s platform to drive better efficiency and cost savings.

Amazon’s other partnership deals in the quarter included Major League Baseball, 21st Century Fox and Verizon.

This is the third quarter in a row in which AWS has increased its sales year-on-year.

“The business has accelerated in the last three quarters and we are seeing great signs in a number of areas,” said Amazon’s chief financial officer, Brian Olsavsky, in a conference call with analysts, transcribed by blogging site Seeking Alpha. “We have added 800 new services and features so far this year – that is an accelerated pace from last year, which was a record year.

“We see customers have migrated more than 80,000 databases using the AWS Database Migration Service, and customers are just branching out to a lot of new products from us.” 

Olsavsky highlighted artificial intelligence (AI) as one of the emerging areas. Major League Baseball announced earlier this month that AWS would be its main provider of AI technology for its player analysis platform, Statcast.

Kate Hanaghan, chief research officer at analyst Tech Market View, said she expects AWS’s UK progress to be representative of the company’s wider growth.

“There is no breakout on AWS in the UK [in the results], but our view is that the pattern of accelerated growth is also happening here,” she said. “We are seeing traction in various industries, but notable progress being made in the public sector, where AWS could really shake up the existing landscape.”

Amazon as a whole recorded $52.9bn net sales in the second quarter, a 39.3% year-on-year increase. Olsavsky said it was a “strong” quarter overall for the company.