Andy Jassy, Amazon’s Head of Web Services, will speak at the WSJDLive Global Technology Conference in Laguna Beach, California, on October 25, 2016
Patrick T. Fallon Bloomberg | Getty Images
Amazon’s cloud computing industry reported 28% revenue growth in the fourth quarter, falling short of analysts ’eyes. Amazon said Andy Jassy, who runs the cloud division, will succeed Jeff Bezos as CEO of Amazon in the third quarter of this year.
Amazon Web Services remains the market leader for cloud computing and storage used by companies, governments and schools to run websites and applications. While Microsoft and Google grew faster in the fourth quarter, they are still far behind Amazon in serving businesses that are fast loading their data.
Revenue at AWS climbed to $ 12.7 billion from $ 9.95 billion a year earlier, lower than the consensus estimate of $ 12.83 billion among analysts surveyed by FactSet. AWS revenue represented 10% of Amazon’s total sales.
AWS continued to drive much of Amazon’s profit. Operating revenue increased 37% from a year earlier to $ 3.56 billion, but slashed FactSet consensus estimates $ 3.75 billion. That means that 52% of the company’s operating income can be given to AWS, compared to about two-thirds in the same period a year ago.
In the fourth quarter, AWS said it would allow customers to use two of their services to manage software devices in on-premises data centers, rather than just in AWS facilities. It also introduced new services, including one for adding maps to applications and another for remotely using Apple’s MacOS operating system.
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