Is Amazon Web Services Worth $19 Billion?

Amazon Web Services is in many ways a proxy for the cloud services business, or at least the infrastructure portion of the cloud services market (infrastructure as a service or platform as a service).

Macquarie Capital estimates that the overall cloud market will hit $71 billion in revenue in 2015 and suggests AWS will have $38 billion, or 53 percent of the total market. Macquarie Capital analyst Ben Schachter therefore estimates AWS would be worth $19 billion, based on a 5X multiple of Macquarie’s 2013 AWS revenue estimate, or $30 billion using an 8X multiple.