Cloud News
Amazon’s AWS Q2 Earnings Preview: Cloud Sales, Profit And AI
Mark Haranas
Amazon’s second-quarter 2023 earnings report is on Thursday, with AWS’ cloud sales, operating income and artificial intelligence push set to take center stage.
Will Amazon Web Services’ revenue growth rate continue to fall? Did the world’s No. 1 cloud computing market-share leader keep its parent company Amazon [AMZN] profitable in second-quarter 2023? Does AWS have any generative artificial intelligence announcements up its sleeve during Amazon’s earnings report Thursday?
CRN breaks down these questions and more ahead of Amazon and AWS’ second-quarter 2023 financial earnings results slated for Aug. 3.
AWS is Amazon’s $85 billion cloud computing company that owns approximately 32 percent of the global cloud infrastructure services market. The Seattle-based cloud giant has witnessed some sales headwinds as of late, with AWS’ sales growth rate dropping several percentage points each quarter for the past year.
[Related: AWS Easily Beats Microsoft In $120B IaaS Cloud Market: Gartner]
AWS Q2 Earnings Estimate: $21.5 Billion
The Zacks Consensus estimate is that AWS will report net sales of $21.5 billion for second-quarter 2023, which would mark the company’s slowest sales growth rate in years.
In first-quarter 2023, AWS generated total sales of $21.4 billion, up 16 percent year over year. For the full-year 2022, AWS increased annual sales by 29 percent to over $80 billion.
Another key figure to look at is AWS’ operating income as operating expenses have increased by billions of dollars over the past several quarters.
AWS did confirm with CRN earlier this year that the cloud company would be affected by Amazon’s 9,000 layoff round in 2023. “AWS head count is higher now than it was in 2021 due to rapid growth,” AWS told CRN in April. “These role eliminations only impact a small, single-digit percentage of AWS employees.”
Wall Street and financial analysts are projecting Amazon reports second-quarter 2023 total earnings of roughly $131.5 billion, which would represent an 8.5 percent sales increase year over year.
Here are the five most important things to watch for during Amazon and AWS’ second-quarter 2023 earnings results on Aug. 3, as well as the recent results of Google Cloud’s and Microsoft’s quarterly earnings.
