Amazon posts loss as revenue climbs
Amazon resumed its money-losing ways in the first quarter, even though it sold a lot of things.
The retailer lost 12 cents a share for a net loss of $57 million, as revenue rose 15 percent — a little more steeply than expected — to $22.72 billion.
For the first time, the Web retailer broke out numbers for Amazon Web Services, the cloud computing unit that had been buried in the category “other.” Amazon more or less invented cloud computing, which is expected to become a $100 billion market as companies rent processing power instead of setting up data centers.
AWS had net sales of $1.57 billion in the first quarter, up 49 percent from $1.05 billion in the first quarter of 2014.
“Amazon Web Services is a $5 billion business and still growing fast — in fact, it’s accelerating,” Jeff Bezos, founder and chief executive of Amazon.com, said in a statement.
Microsoft’s Azure, the company’s cloud computing platform, is in second place, but far behind.
Investors have been growing restless with Amazon’s long-term strategy of plowing most of the money it makes into new areas like cloud computing, streaming video and hardware — leading to razor-thin profits or, in this quarter’s case, a loss.
In recent months Amazon introduced Amazon Echo, a Bluetooth speaker that responds to voice commands and Amazon Dash, stand-alone buttons that can be pressed to reorder household goods.