While year-to-year growth for Amazon’s retail business ranged from 13 percent to 20 percent from Q1 to Q3 2015, Amazon Web Services—the retailer’s network of servers and data storage technology—has grown 49 percent to 81 percent during that same interval. AWS also grew into a significant portion of Amazon’s total operating income, from 38 percent in Q1 2015 to 52 percent in Q3 2015.62 AWS generated $12.2 billion in sales by the end of Q3 2017 and profits of $1.17 billion (versus the company as a whole with $347 million).63 In other words, while the world still thinks of Amazon as a retailer,
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Key to its survival in 2020 plague terms.
