AWS’ History-Making Quarter Results In $51B Revenue Run Rate
‘AWS added more revenue quarter over quarter and year over year than any quarter in its history,’ Amazon chief financial officer Brian Olsavsky said during an earnings call with analysts on Tuesday.
Amazon Web Services ended last year with its strongest quarter-over-quarter and year-over-year performance since its 2006 launch, putting the cloud computing leader on track for a $51 billion annualized revenue run rate.
“AWS added more revenue quarter over quarter and year over year than any quarter in its history,” Amazon chief financial officer Brian Olsavsky said during an earnings call with analysts on Tuesday.
AWS reported revenue of $12.74 billion for the fourth quarter that ended Dec. 31, 2020, a 28 percent increase from the same period last year. It ended 2020 with full-year revenue of $45.37 billion, a 29.5 percent increase from 2019.
“We continue to see companies meaningfully growing their plans to move to AWS,” Olsavsky said.
AWS ended the year with its ninth annual re:Invent conference for customers and partners –- its first held virtually. AWS announced more than 180 new services and features -- across compute, storage, databases, machine learning and other technologies -- at re:Invent.
“The team also announced significant customer momentum with new commitments in migrations from JPMorgan Chase, Thomson Reuters, Viacom, CBS and Twitter just to name a few,” Olsavsky said.
The performance caps the final full year as founding CEO of AWS for Andy Jassy. Amazon on Tuesday announced that Jassy will replace Jeff Bezos as CEO of parent company Amazon.com beginning in the third quarter that starts July 1.
That changing of the guard further solidifies the value of the role that AWS plays in the broader Amazon strategy, according to Josh Perkins, field chief technology officer at AHEAD, an AWS Premier Consulting Partner based in Chicago.
“It is crucial to its operations and the future of its revenue-generation potential,” Perkins said. “AWS was born out of Amazon’s own needs, and its commercialization was market-defining. The move makes sense in that Andy’s track record is well-aligned to Jeff’s vision and unflinching commitment to innovation as the focus for the future of the company that he founded.“
AWS had a backlog of future contracts totaling about $50 billion at the end of 2020, according to David Fildes, Amazon’s director of investor relations.
“That’s up about 68 percent year over year, so that’s one component of all the great work that AWS is doing,” he said. “You’re seeing some continued very strong…usage and revenue growth. It’s continuing to grow at a meaningfully larger absolute dollar rate than others out there, and we’re really please.”