Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by nl 2752 days ago
That's nonsense.

AWS is a very large business, and much more profitable than selling physical goods online.

But Amazon's overall revenue was $56.6B (Q3 2018[1]) and "only" $6.68B of that was AWS. By comparison, revenue from Amazon's advertising business is $2.5B - and no one is claiming that is their main line of business.

Even the article you point to shows Amazon made a profit of $1.69B on North American ecommerce vs $1.35B profit from AWS.

So yeah - AWS is a high margin business, but no where near their "main business".

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/25/amazon-earnings-q3-2018.html