E commerce overtakes bricks-and-mortar, but with help of cloud


Posted on July 25, 2015  /  2 Comments

So Amazon is bigger than Walmart. When will Alibaba overtake Walmart? That will be the day, since there’ll be no help from cloud services

The surge added another $40 billion or so to Amazon’s market cap. That will almost assuredly propel it to be more valuable than Walmart for the first time when the stock market opens Friday, making this a deeply symbolic moment for e-commerce and the Internet. It is also a nice present for Amazon, which celebrated its 20th birthday last week.

“Holy cow, what a quarter,” said Jason Moser, an analyst with the Motley Fool website and an Amazon investor. “They blew that thing out of the water.”

Amazon’s second-quarter profit amounted to 19 cents a share. A year ago, the company lost 27 cents a share. Analysts had been predicting another loss of 13 cents.

Revenue was better than expected, too, up 20 percent to $23.2 billion. That was about $800 million more than forecast.

One big contribution to the improved profit and revenue was Amazon Web Services, the cloud computing division whose numbers were broken out for the first time in the first quarter. A.W.S. is the undisputed leader in the sector, outdistancing both Microsoft and Google, but analysts had been wondering if price cuts would hamper growth.

2 Comments


  1. This is a good example of taking advantage from economy of scope. High temporal variation of e-commerce platform demand,which picks up during x-mass, gave the opportunity of launching cloud services of unused facility, during most of the year. The rapid growth of bandwidth capacity at eroding price is accelerating the option of accessing enterprise grade computing facility of the west to other side of the glove, at a fraction of cost. Statistical multiplexing of global demand erodes cost of computing and storage, which opens new growth opportunities..public policy should take into consideration in devising national ICT policies to take advantage of such changes..

  2. Due to variation in location, customer base and commodity it sales, I am not sure, whether Alibaba enjoys similar temporal variation of demand of its e-commerce platform as experienced by Amazon. If not so, Alibaba will not likely get, even wants to, the bump from cloud service, as it’s counter part got,to overtake Walmart…what is the likely alternate competitive advantage?