AWS India Falls Into Losses In FY20 Even As Revenue Swells Up 58%

Amazon Internet Service, the Indian unit of cloud computing giant Amazon Web Services, has reported a 58% spike in its revenue to INR 4,215.9 Cr in the financial year 2020, with INR 4,178 Cr in expenses. But while it had ended FY2019 with a net profit of INR 71.1 Cr, AWS recorded a net loss of INR 20 Lakh after tax in FY20. Notably, it reported profit before tax of INR 37.6 Cr for the year.

Amazon Internet Services saw revenue from continuing operations jump to INR 4,161.6 Cr from INR 2,637.2 Cr, primarily on account of the usage of cloud and other related services by existing and new customers in India. The revenue from cloud-related services stood at INR 4,005.5 Cr, while the company earned INR 156.1 Cr from marketing services.

According to the regulatory filings, the cloud-related services consisted of amounts earned from sales of compute, storage, database and other cloud-related service offerings for startups, enterprises, government agencies, and academic institutions in India.

On the other hand, marketing services comprise amounts earned from general marketing and promotional services provided to Amazon Web Services, Inc.

AWS is the leading public cloud players with over 50% share in the cloud infrastructure market globally. It is followed by Microsoft at 13.3% and Alibaba at a distant 4.6%. The company launched AWS Asia Pacific (Mumbai) Region with two availability zones, a logical data center, in 2016 has seen marginal growth in adding new customers in the region.

Globally, AWS has 77 availability zones across 24 infrastructure regions, with announced plans to launch 15 more availability zones and five more AWS Regions in India, Indonesia, Japan, Spain, and Switzerland.

Last month, AWS announced that it will be investing about INR 20,761 Cr ($2.77 Bn) to open a second infrastructure Cloud region in Hyderabad by mid-2022 with three availability zones. The company has opened its first India infrastructure cloud region in Mumbai, India. It will join the existing nine AWS regions and 26 availability zones across Asia.

With this move, the Jeff Bezos-led company is looking to attract more local and global services firms to host applications on its cloud facilities, while taking on rivals Google Cloud, IBM Cloud and Microsoft Azure. The cloud region will provide customers with even greater resiliency for critical cloud workloads, lower latency, and improved compliance capabilities.

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