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Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN) has reported its seventh straight quarter of profit and beat earnings estimates. All this, thanks to its hugely profitable cloud segment, Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Amazon’s Financials
Amazon’s fourth quarter revenues grew 22% over the year to $43.7 billion, compared with the market’s expectations of $44.68 billion. EPS of $1.54 beat the Street’s forecast of $1.35 per share. Net income increased to $749 million from $482 million a year ago. Operating income increased 13% to $1.3 billion.

By segment, net product sales increased 15% to $30.63 billion and net services sales grew 43.7% to $13.11 billion.

Amazon ended the year with net sales growing 27% to $136 billion and net income increasing 302% to $2.4 billion or $4.9 per diluted share. Operating income grew 91% to $4.2 billion.

Amazon’s headcount increased by 48% or 111,400 during the year to take the total to 341,000. It plans to add 100,000 more jobs over the next 18 months. Five years ago, Amazon employed just 32,000 people globally and now its hiring spree in one year rivals Microsoft’s total headcount of 120,000.

For the current quarter, Amazon projected revenues of $33.25 billion-$35.75 billion with operating income of $250 million-$900 million. The Street was looking for revenues of $27.7 billion with an operating income of $665 million.

AWS Initiatives
AWS, the profit engine of Amazon, continued to grow with millions of active customers. It added Workday, Salesforce, Capital One, Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), McDonald’s, and others to its list of enterprise customers. Operating income was $926 million on $3.53 billion (up 47%) in revenue in Q4 2016. For the full year 2016, operating income was $3.1 billion (up 55%) on revenue of $12.3 billion.

AWS accelerated its infrastructure expansion in 2016, opening 11 Availability Zones across five geographic regions in the US, Korea, India, and most recently, Canada and the UK. It now operates 42 Availability Zones across 16 infrastructure regions globally and plans to open an additional five Availability Zones in France and China.