Growth Amazon Web Services decreases slightly, but still performs better than expected

Amazon Web Services posted sales 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 cloud division of the tech giant rose by 37 percent.

The stagnant growth of the AWS division even causes a decrease in operating 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, the Amazon Web Services cloud services are the main source of income for the billion-dollar company; Amazon is by far the largest in this sector.

Despite the lesser 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 is more than 41 percent higher than expected and an immense increase compared to the first quarter of 2022, given that the company was still running a loss of almost 3.5 billion euros.

Although the results are a lot better than last year, Amazon is cautious; an ‘uncertain economy’, according to the company, leads to more conservative spending, both at Amazon and consumers. As far as the latter category is concerned, this is reflected in a constant spending pattern in the web shop. As far as Amazon itself is concerned, this year included 18,000 layoffs in January and another 9,000 employees who had to leave in March.