Will Amazon Web Services continue to stay at the top in 2020?

Cloud computing is a rapidly growing market, which is ruled by three prominent players at present – Amazon’s (NYSE: AMZN) AWS, Microsoft’s (NYSE: MSFT) Azure and Alphabet’s (NYSE: GOOG) Google Cloud.

Of the three, AWS is the current leader in the field thanks to its vast experience and user base. Over the past five quarters, net sales of AWS has increased consistently on a year-over-year and sequential basis.

In the third quarter of 2019, AWS’ net sales increased 35% year-over-year to around $9 billion. On a sequential basis, sales was up 8%. Net sales on a trailing 12-month basis also increased consistently on a sequential basis during this period.

Based on data from Intellipaat, AWS has the largest number of availability zones compared to its competitors Azure and Google Cloud. AWS is also ahead of the other two in terms of market share and holds over 30% stake in the space.

However, AWS has been seeing a slowdown in its rate of growth which is a cause of concern for investors. While sales grew 46% year-over-year in the third quarter of 2018, it rose only 35% in Q3 2019. Its competitors on the other hand have been witnessing a higher growth rate on revenue.

The data also shows that Azure and Google Cloud have an edge over AWS in terms of integration and pricing respectively. These are factors that could help them slowly take away market share from AWS over time.

Also read: Amazon Q3 2019 Conference Call Transcript

Amazon continues to invest in AWS to improve infrastructure to support higher usage demand which has led to an increase in costs. This trend is expected to continue in the fourth quarter of 2019.

With regards to pricing, the company is looking at incremental price decreases for long-term customers. As of the third quarter, Amazon had $27 billion in future commitments for AWS, which was up 54% year-over-year. The company is also working on rolling out new products which are cheaper than the older ones.

All in all, while AWS is the leader in the cloud space at present, it faces tough competition from Azure and Google Cloud and the former might face some market share erosion over the next year as its rivals race to catch up.

Amazon’s shares have gained 21% so far this year and 35% over the trailing 52 weeks. The stock was up 1.8% in morning hours on Thursday.

Listen to publicly listed companies’ earnings conference calls along with the edited closed caption text.