Amazon Web Services achieves £5.6bn in sales in 2015

Amazon Web Services (AWS) generated revenues of $2.4 billion (£1.7bn) during Amazon’s fourth quarter, setting the public cloud division up for an annual run rate of $10 billion. However that figure could be higher as growth continues, albeit at a lower rate than previously

AWS’ fourth quarter revenue grew 69 percent year-over-year, a slight decrease from the previous quarter’s growth of 78 percent. The company reported an operating income of $687 million.

For the whole of 2015, AWS generated $7.9 billion (£5.6bn) in sales.

AWS has expanded significantly in 2015, setting up new wind farms to power its data centres with renewable energy, opening up new cloud regions and entering the Internet of Things arena. In total, Amazon said it added 722 new features and services to AWS last year.

Amazon CFO Brian Olsavsky said on a conference call with analysts yesterday: “We feel like we have a lead in this space and we don’t take it for granted.”

But the cloud division’s success was overshadowed by falling shares for Amazon as a whole, as Amazon missed expectations on sales and revenue, despite it being its most profitable quarter on record.

Net profit for Amazon in the fourth quarter reached $482 million (£335m) , up from $214 million (£149m) for the same period last year.

Amazon boss Jeff Bezos said: “Twenty years ago, I was driving the packages to the post office myself and hoping we might one day afford a forklift. This year, we pass $100 billion in annual sales and serve 300 million customers.”