Amazon triples Cloud services earnings from India to ~21.47 bn

US retail giant Amazon more than tripled its earnings to ~21.47 billion from Cloud and data-hosting services in India, while profits surged by more than 10 times to ~1.16 billion in the year that ended March 31, 2018.

Amazon Data Services, which is into the business of data storage, protection, safety and recovery, and web hosting, posted a revenue of ~9.45 billion in FY18, while making a profit of ~879 million.

On the other hand, Amazon Internet Services, which is a reseller of Amazon Web Services in India, posted a revenue of ~12.06 billion while making a profit of ~285 million, showed documents filed with the Registrar of Companies sourced from Paper.vc. In FY17, Amazon Data Services had posted a revenue of ~2.4 billion and a profit of ~221 million, while Amazon Internet Services posted a revenue of ~3.9 billion at a loss of ~109 million.

The combined earnings of both entities in FY18 represents a more than three-time year-on-year growth in revenues and over ten-time Y-o-Y growth in profits. The massive growth comes at a time when Amazon is doubling down on growing its Cloud offerings in India, besides its core e-commerce business.

Globally, Amazon Web Services (AWS), the company's Cloud computing division, is a money-making machine for the technology giant. In the quarter that ended September, Amazon reported $6.7 billion in revenues from AWS, a growth of 46 per cent. Amazon's overall revenues in the quarter grew by 29 per cent to $56.6 billion.

In December 2017, Amazon announced AWS had been empanelled by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology to provide Cloud services to the Indian government and its various departments. This was seen as a major step for the company to tap into the growing need for data storage in India.

Apart from the government, Amazon has focused on winning contracts from several large private companies to host their data on its servers, along with valueadded services, including analytics, AI and ML. Analysts say Amazon is leading the pack among its peers Microsoft and Google in providing Cloud services in India.

Amazon has just one data centre in India, located in Mumbai, while Microsoft has three. The government's push to localise data storage by companies within the geographic bounds of the country is expected to give even more stimulus to the industry to set up data centres here.

In late 2016, Amazon infused ~13.8 billion into its data services business in India, largely seen as an investment to expand local Cloud capacity as the Indian government and entities such as the RBI began showing signs of mandating local data storage. For now, only the RBI has mandated local storage of transaction data by banks and other players in the digital payment space.