Amazon Web Services growth is declining slightly, but is still performing better than expected

Amazon Web Services posted revenues of more than $21 billion in the first quarter of 2023, which is an increase of 16 percent compared to the previous quarter. A year ago, turnover from the tech giant’s cloud department increased by 37 percent.

The stagnant growth of the AWS department even causes a decline in operational income within this division, namely 4.6 billion euros in Q1 of 2023 compared to almost 5.9 billion euros in the same quarter last year. After selling products in the webshop and facilitating third-party webshop sales, Amazon Web Services cloud services are the billion-dollar company’s main source of income; Amazon is by far the largest in this sector.

Despite the inferior results of this important department reports Amazon a total turnover of 115.5 billion euros in Q1 of 2023, which is an increase of 9 percent compared to the same quarter in 2022. This good result results in a profit of just under 2.88 billion euros, an amount that exceeds 41 percent higher than expected and an immense increase compared to the first quarter of 2022, given that the company was still making a loss of almost 3.5 billion euros.

Although the results are a lot better than last year, Amazon is cautious; According to the company, an ‘uncertain economy’ causes money to be spent more conservatively, both at Amazon and consumers. As far as the latter category is concerned, this is reflected in a unchanged spending pattern in the webshop. As far as Amazon itself is concerned, this was reflected in, among other things, 18,000 layoffs in January and another 9,000 employees who had to leave in March.