Oct 30 (Reuters) - Amazon.com (AMZN) forecast
quarterly revenue largely above Wall Street estimates on
Thursday on strong demand for its cloud services as businesses
continue to spend relentlessly on artificial intelligence.
The massive cloud demand is helping the tech company ease
the pressure from weaker growth at its e-commerce business,
which is gearing up for the holiday season amid weakness in
consumer confidence stemming from global trade uncertainty.
Amazon (AMZN) projected net sales of between $206 billion and
$213.0 billion in the fourth quarter, while analysts on average
were expecting revenue of $208.12 billion, according to data
compiled by LSEG.
Its cloud unit, Amazon Web Services, reported a 20% rise in
revenue in the third quarter ending in September, compared with
the estimates of a 17.95% increase.
The strong results from AWS, the world's largest cloud
provider, followed stellar cloud revenue growth reported on
Wednesday by Microsoft's (MSFT) Azure and Google
Cloud, the No. 2 and No. 3 players in the industry,
respectively.
Microsoft (MSFT), Google-parent Alphabet and Facebook owner Meta
all announced plans for higher annual capital expenditures as
they pour money into chips and data centers.
AWS typically accounts for a little more than 15% of
Amazon's (AMZN) total revenue, but the segment is a huge profit engine,
making up roughly 60% of the company's total operating income.
The unit reported revenue growth of 17.5% in the second quarter.
(Reporting by Deborah Sophia in Bengaluru; Editing by Anil
D'Silva)
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