[m0zg]

Amazon not only recovered their dip, but renewed their 52 week max several times already. And they don't even make much from online retail. To make matters more interesting, AWS seems to be _much_ busier than usual, and spot capacity is all but gone, at least at the price we were paying before. I'm not even sure why that is.

[dragonwriter]

> To make matters more interesting, AWS seems to be _much_ busier than usual, and spot capacity is all but gone, at least at the price we were paying before. I'm not even sure why that is.

Because a lot of the online services that are seeing higher use (whether it's telework support, e-commerce, or otherwise) are, in whole or in part, hosted on AWS.

[jnbiche]

Amazon makes almost 50% of their annual revenue from online retail. Many billions of dollars. It's by far their biggest product category.

Yes, through accounting magic, they're making the majority of their profits via AWS, but that's part of Bezos's long-term strategy and could be changed on a dime (at the potential expense of the long-term growth he's targeting).

Top line, most of their business is from online retail, not AWS.

(edited because my original was a bit of a flame, and didn't clarify profit vs revenue distinction)

[doingmyting]

Amazon makes substantially more from AWS than its retail segment. Retail revenue is higher but revenue does not equal profit. For instance last quarter AWS revenue was 13% compares to retail but it contributed 52% of operating income.

[kolmogorov]

Those are accounting tricks

[lmm]

Citation needed. It seems pretty common-sense that retail would be lower-margin than digital services.

[m0zg]

Revenue doesn't matter. Profit does. Most of their profit is from AWS.

[User23]

To Amazon future free cash flows are what matters, as pretty much every Bezos shareholder letter ever has explicitly said.

Edit: When I read his letter in 2004 I went long and I've never looked back. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1018724/000119312505...

[robocat]

Division profits are mostly an accounting ghost.

Tomorrow they could decide to use the AWS profits for growth, and reduce the growth spending on Amazon by the same amount, and suddenly the sense of your sentence is reversed.

[m0zg]

> Division profits are mostly an accounting ghost.

Shareholders seem to think otherwise.

[robocat]

AMZN is well known for paying out its profits to shareholders?

I think what shareholders value is a little deeper than woo “AWS appears profitable”!

[m0zg]

If AWS wasn't profitable, AMZN would not be able to grow, and its share price would immediately fly off a cliff. But you know this already. You just want to argue.

[dmitriid]

> AWS seems to be _much_ busier than usual, and spot capacity is all but gone, at least at the price we were paying before. I'm not even sure why that is.

With so many people inside everyone is using online services: streaming, shopping, chatting, video, audio, gaming.

Almost anything "online" is very likely to run at least something on AWS these days.

[rstupek]

Also include businesses provisioning virtual desktop computers using AWS

[throwaway1777]

Because people are online more since they can’t go outside.

[Leherenn]

I think I've seen the number +15% for traffic. Lots of video conferencing/entertainment/online shops will have increased traffic.