When you were a child, you stood at the base of the Empire State Building and looked up to the top. How did it feel to read Amazon’s Q4 report yesterday?
Among the huge number of people…
There are now more than 1.6 million people working for Amazon around the world, up from just over 800,000 people at the start of the year.
From last year, net income almost doubled thanks to a strong cloud business and a share of an electric car company called Rivian. Profits could be on the way because Amazon is raising its Prime subscription price for the first time since 2018. It will now cost $139 a year instead of $119, which is how much it has been since 2018.
For the first time, Amazon has revealed the size of its advertising unit. It looks like it’s a lot bigger than you’d expect. It made $31 billion last year, making it a bigger business than YouTube.
Amazon has spent a lot of money on building out its physical infrastructure (warehouses, cloud networks, and so on) over the years. Exxon Mobil, Chevron, and ConocoPhillips spent $61 billion on capital projects last year, which is twice as much as they spent together.
What this means: Amazon is still going strong even though there are problems with the supply chain, rising labour costs, and the ongoing pandemic. already a $1.4 trillion company, its stock rose more than 14% after its earnings report came out because people were excited about them.
But there’s still a problem with how the company does business with its workers.
A day before the start of a big union election at an Alabama warehouse, Amazon released a report. This report came just in time.
Having déjà vu is because this is the second time that workers at this company are voting on whether to join a labour union, and it’s making you feel like things have happened before. Before last year, Amazon won the first vote by a lot. Then, the National Labor Relations Board found that Amazon broke the law and ordered a new vote.
According to the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union, nearly half of the 6,143 people who could vote were not employees at the time the first vote was held.
This is how you zoom out: In the end, Amazon’s report wraps up a crazy period of earnings for the big web companies. You can never be too big to keep growing. Microsoft, Alphabet, Apple, and Amazon are the winners, because they have shown that you can always keep growing. The winner: Meta.