AWS remains Amazon's fastest growing segment

Amazon Web Services (AWS) generated US$7.29 billion in operating income for Amazon.com during the financial reporting year ended 31 December 2018, representing the tech giant's fastest growing division.

Cutting closer in 2018, Amazon operating income for North America was US$7.26 billion, alongside an international operating loss of US$2.1 billion.

This is not the first time the vendor's cloud computing business has performed better financially, in 2017 the division generated an operating income of US$4.3 billion, while Amazon generated US$2.8 billion.

To put it in perspective, AWS' year-over-year net sales growth was 47 per cent in 2018, growing faster than the other business segments.

Overall, Amazon posted a growth rate of 31 per cent. Net sales for the full year increased 31 per cent to US$232.9 billion, compared with US$177.9 billion in 2017.

Meanwhile, operating income increased to US$12.4 billion, compared with operating income of US$4.1 billion in 2017. Net income increased to US$10.1 billion compared with net income of US$3.0 billion, in 2017.

For the first quarter of 2019, Amazon expects operating income to be between US$2.3 billion and US$3.3 billion, compared with US$1.9 billion in first quarter 2018.

In its financial results, Amazon mentioned among its highlights for 2018 the deal with the National Australia Bank who chosen AWS as their long-term strategic cloud provider.

As previously reported by ARN, NAB plans to migrate more than 300 applications, including core banking systems, to AWS by the end of 2019.

NAB said it will align to a “cloud-first” strategy going forward, leveraging AWS for compute, storage, database and analytics capabilities.

The aim of the strategic partnership is to build new services to deliver "better financial outcomes" for NAB’s nine million customers around the globe.