Dive Brief:

• Amazon reported Q1 revenue of $22.72 billion on Thursday, an increase of 15% year over year, coupled with a net loss of $57 million, which comes out to negative $0.12 per share. Amazon beat expectations as analysts expected negative earnings of $0.13 per share on revenue of $22.39 billion.
• As promised earlier this year, the retail giant for the first time separately reported its revenue from its Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud business, which was $5.16 billion last year and $1.56 billion in sales in Q1 2015, up 49% from last year.
• Amazon said total Q2 sales would likely hit between $20.6 billion and $22.8 billion, in line with Wall Street expectations of $22.1 billion.

Dive Insight:

Amazon has been under pressure to deliver profits, and these earnings, just beating expectations, may ease that pressure. But without its cloud services, the reality is that Amazon remains an unprofitable retailer.

Observers have long suspected that Amazon’s cloud services business was the source of solid performance for the retailer. “Born a decade ago, AWS is a good example of how we approach ideas and risk-taking at Amazon," CEO Jeff Bezos said yesterday. "We manage by two seemingly contradictory traits: impatience to deliver faster and a willingness to think long term."

In the future, it's possible that Amazon won’t be known primarily for its e-retail business. “This is a huge opportunity and as such Jeff Bezos, our CEO and founder, has said several times that he believes the opportunity is so big that maybe AWS, over time, may become bigger than the retail company," Amazon CTO Werner Vogels said in an interview with CNBC.