The Cornerstone of Digital Economy Assignment | Essay Help Services

The U.S. public cloud giants, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, all reported their quarterly earnings this week. The key takeaway is the acceleration of digital transformation amid the global pandemic. As Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said, “We’ve seen two years’ worth of digital transformation in two months.” Needless to say, cutting-edge cloud infrastructure is the cornerstone of their success. We highlight the growth of their cloud business, new products & deal wins, and Capex plans below.

Business Momentum

• AWS revenue topped $10.2 billion, with stable growth of 33% YoY. The operating margin of AWS increased to 30% due to a change in depreciation accounting.
• Microsoft’s Intelligent Cloud grew 27% YoY during the quarter, driven by a strong Azure (61% YoY). Azure powers 75 million DAU for Microsoft Teams.
• Google Cloud also grew by 52% YoY (with GCP’s growth meaningfully higher). G Suite now has 6 million paying customers and Google Meet surpassed 100 million daily meeting participants.

• New Functions
  • AWS: Amazon Detective, Amazon Keyspaces, Amazon App Flow
  • Azure: Azure Edge Zone
  • GCP: Anthos (multi-cloud)
• Deal Wins
  • AWS: NFL
  • Azure: Coca-Cola (5-year), BlackRock, NBA
  • GCP: Loblaws, Wayfair, Vodafone

Cloud Capex & Investments

• Amazon’s Capex, including property acquired under capital lease, increased 50% YoY to $8.9 billion in Q1′ 20.
• After a period of slow investment in data centers, Microsoft’s Capex increased 47% YoY last quarter. The management also expect a healthy Capex next quarter as server supply constraints are eased.
• Google expects a modest decrease of Capex YoY, the most reduction of which comes from construction.
• Facebook saw a similar decrease in construction efforts due to shelter-in-place.

Google did $8.5 billion buybacks in Q1′ 20 vs. $3.0 billion in Q1′ 19. Sundar clearly thought his company is undervalued: ramping up buybacks significantly in the past year.

Google took a shot at Zoom last week: in the coming weeks, it will make its Meet video conferencing tool available for free to all consumer Google accounts.

This is not Google’s first attempt in video conferencing, there are more Google apps for video chat than we can keep track of: Google Allo, Google Duo, Google+, Google Hangout… the list goes on.

All tech giants have their own video apps for years, but no one really thought of it as a top priority. We only see them pushing harder recently after Zoom Video Communications taking off and dominating the headline.

What does that tell us? Even with all the talks about tech giants dominating our everyday life, there’s always going to be an opportunity available for better products for the right market.

Apple does most of the assembly and sources a lot of components from China. The supply chain proved to be resilient during this challenging time, as we learned from the earnings call last night.

Hit by such a severe global pandemic, with most of the factories in China shut down for half of the quarter, the local suppliers were able to quickly restore the production capacity back to normal in just a month.

This is often the under-appreciated part of the global supply chain. Just like China needs years to develop more advanced technology, it’ll take years for firms like Apple to set up assembly lines anywhere else that can match the current level of resilience and flexibility.