[ph0rque]

Amazon, the company that “will never make money” surprised Wall Street last week with strong profits and it seems to me that they are going to start producing cash like these other big tech companies now.

I missed this... any good articles about it?

[roymurdock]

> AWS reported an operating income of $521m during Q3, which is almost on a par with the amount brought in by its parent company’s entire North American online retail business ($528m).

http://www.computerweekly.com/news/4500256048/Amazon-turns-s...

[eddd]

http://uk.businessinsider.com/analysts-wrong-about-amazon-pr...

[sharemywin]

wonder when amazon shed's it e-commerce business to focus on it's real money maker cloud computing?

[adventured]

They'll remain linked for at least another decade. Bezos can now lean on AWS to print money that he can funnel into numerous other expeditions. He won't let go of it any time soon, he has been seeking a big money maker for some time (see: efforts in search, auctions, advertising, phones - where the leaders have generated sizable profits).

Why did Amazon launch a semi-high priced phone (rather than stay consistent to the traditional low price strategy)? Bezos was hoping it would spit off a few billion a year in profit, and they'd finally have a big cash fountain to swim in like his competitors in tech.

In four to six years AWS will be a $150-$200 billion company in terms of valuation. It'll be capable of generating $4 or $5 billion in operating profit in that time frame. It'll likely pass Facebook in terms of sales within 36 months, and Facebook is worth $292 billion.

[ousta]

this is not amazon strategy to ever get rid of the ecommerce business.

Amazon strategy is to become a leader in many fields, they got lucky and envisionned the potential of cloud early, for commerce of goods it is a thousand year old industry with big competition from all other the world, their goal is to cut costs, not to care about short term returns and once other businness collapse due to prices cuts that they cant folllow, then amazon will be the only leader in commerce and will rule the price of pretty much everything that is traded in the world.