With Amazon, Inc.'s AMZN first-quarter earnings announced on Thursday, all major global cloud service providers have now reported, and it is time to take stock of how each of their cloud businesses fared in the quarter.
Amazon Flags Slowdown: Amazon Web Services, or AWS, contributed $21.35 billion or 16.8% to the company's overall revenue of $127.36 billion in the first quarter. On a year-over-year basis, AWS revenue rose 15.8%, marking a slowdown from the 20.2% growth in the fourth quarter.
The segment has seen its sixth straight quarter of slowing growth now. On a quarter-over-quarter basis, AWS' revenue edged down 0.11%.
AWS contributed $5.12 billion in operating profit in the first quarter, down marginally from $5.21 billion in the fourth quarter.
Amazon Cloud business's contribution helped offset the $1.25 billion operating loss incurred by the company's international e-commerce business.
More importantly, an inflection may not happen in the near term. CFO Brian Olsavsky said tough economic conditions in the first quarter led customers to evaluate ways to optimize their cloud spending. He expects these optimizations to continue into the second quarter, with April revenue growth rates about 500 basis points lower than was seen in the first quarter.
Commenting on the outlook, Deepwater Asset Management's Gene Munster said AWS could be on track for 11% growth in the June quarter, compared to Street estimate of 13%.
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Microsoft's Azure: Microsoft Corp.'s MSFT Intelligent Cloud business contributed revenue of $22.1 billion in the fiscal year third quarter that ended in March 2023. The segment saw 16% growth.
Within the segment, server products and cloud services revenue climbed 17%, driven by “Azure and other cloud services” revenue growth of 27%. Azure is Microsoft's public computing platform, which provides a broad range of cloud services, and it is in direct competition with AWS and Alphabet, Inc.'s GOOGL GOOG Google Cloud Platform, or GCP.
Microsoft doesn't break down the absolute number for Azure. The 27% growth for Azure was a deceleration from the 31% growth in the fourth quarter but outpaced Amazon's 15.8% growth.
Alphabet's GCP: Alphabet's GCP revenue was at $7.45 billion in the first quarter of 2023, up 28% from $5.82 billion in the year-ago period. Sequentially, GCP's revenue rose 1.8% from $7.32 billion in the fourth quarter of 2022.
The division turned around to report an operating income of $191 million versus an operating loss of $706 million in the first quarter of 2022.
Tech Price Action: During early Friday trading, Amazon shares were slipping 4.3% to $105.04 according to Benzinga Pro data. Microsoft was up 0.6% to $306.68 and Alphabet was slipping 1.31% to $106.95.
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