It wasn’t the opposite .
By 2015 they were trying to hide how much of the group growth and profits were largely contributed by just AWS , i.e. they were hiding the e-commerce margins .
Without AWS and subscriptions, Amazon is quite an unprofitable company.
Both overall growth and margin driven by AWS(and prime) while E-commerce revenue remains outsized because they count GMV as revenue which is iffy even when they own the merchandise, but being largely a marketplace these days GMV is very misleading metric.
It would be like Stripe decided to count their revenue as $1.4T the amount they processed this year as revenue rather than $10-20B they actually got after paying the banks, merchants , VISA etc . This 20B is not profit either just the pie from which salaries cloud costs etc have to be paid to get to actual profit.
Correct. It wasn’t a secret that AWS was profitable. Revealing those numbers put a lot more pressure on Amazon to get other business lines in better shape financially. Something Amazon was keen to avoid for as long as it could.