Amazon Web Services continues to be a major money machine for its corporate parent, and continues to hold steady as the market share leader in the public cloud market, according to Amazon’s most recent earnings report and new data from Synergy Research Group.
In its first quarter 2022 earnings report, Amazon said that AWS recorded $18.44 billion in revenue during the quarter, beating consensus analyst estimates of $18.27 billion, according to StreetAccount. This represented more than 36% growth in revenue over the same period last year.
That rate of growth, however, was slower than the 39.5% revenue increase AWS posted in the fourth quarter of 2021, according to CNBC. Also, AWS' performance did little to avert Wall Street's eyes from the corporate parent's surprising first quarter loss and consequent sharp decline in share price.
Still, cloud infrastructure spending by corporate enterprises only continues to grow, and AWS continues to sit comfortably in place as the market share leader with 33% of the market, Synergy’s new data suggested.
While rivals are gaining market share little by little, AWS continues to be buoyed by the ongoing growth of the overall market. In the first quarter cloud infrastructure spending by enterprises reached almost $53 billion, a 34% increase over the same quarter in 2021, according to Synergy, and marking the eleventh time in 12 quarters that the year-over-year growth rate has been in the 34% to 40% range.
Meanwhile, Microsoft Azure continues to hold second-place market share at 22%, but consistently continues to gain almost two percentage points of market share per year, Synergy said. In what is largely a three-horse race, but one without much drama for now, that leaves Google Cloud with third-place market share of 10% and gaining about one percentage point in market share annually.
Beyond these three, other cloud providers, a group that includes Alibaba, IBM/Kyndryl and Salesforce, among others, have grown their revenues by over 150% since the first quarter of 2018, but have seen their collective market share drop from 48% to 36% because their growth rates can’t keep pace with the Big Three, Synergy said.
“While the level of competition remains high, the huge and rapidly growing cloud market continues to coalesce around Amazon, Microsoft and Google,” said John Dinsdale, a Chief Analyst at Synergy Research Group, in a statement. “Aside from the Chinese market, which remains totally dominated by local Chinese companies, other cloud providers simply cannot match the scale and geographic reach of the big three market leaders. As Amazon, Microsoft and Google continue to grow at 35-50% per year, other non-Chinese cloud providers are typically growing in the 10-20% range. That can still be an attractive proposition for those smaller providers, as long as they focus on regional or service niches where they can differentiate themselves from the big three.”