
How to calculate operating margin in the cloud
- August 8, 2021
When we think about operating margins, we often think of operating profits, or what they represent for the company.
But they can also be more complex.
Operating margins are the number of dollars a company can generate for each dollar it spends on operations, which is an important metric to understand if you’re working on a big data project.
We looked at the average operating margin of every major cloud provider for 2016, and it’s been trending down for the past two years.
The reason for the decrease in operating margins is a number of factors, including a drop in cloud revenues and a drop from the $7 billion annual cloud revenue to $4.9 billion.
This year, the largest drops were from AWS to Microsoft, Amazon, and Google, and the next largest drops came from Microsoft and IBM.
However, the operating margins are still significantly higher than they were in 2015, so the drop in operating profits from last year shouldn’t come as a surprise.