Welcome to our weekly roundup of the top five Amazon news stories of the week.
Amazon cancels New York City campus plan: BBC News reports that Amazon has said it will not build a new headquarters in New York, citing fierce opposition from state and local politicians. The dramatic turnabout comes just months after the firm named New York City one of two sites selected for major expansion over the next decades. City and state leaders had agreed to provide about $3bn (£2.3bn) in incentives to secure that investment. Those subsidies had prompted a fierce backlash in some quarters. Continue reading…
How Amazon makes money Katie Brigham at CNBC reports that Amazon reported a record profit in 2018, earning $10.1 billion in net income compared with just $3 billion the prior year. Considering the company hardly recorded any profit until 2016, this sudden cash influx represents a new era for Amazon. Despite Amazon’s dominance in e-commerce, online sales are not actually a main profit engine for the company. Instead, its cloud computing division, Amazon Web Services, has actually generated the majority of Amazon’s operating income since 2016. Profits from advertising and third-party sellers are also booming. Continue reading…
Amazon opens up Alexa store for anyone to create and publish custom skills: Tom Watten at The Verge reports that Amazon is now letting anyone create and publish Alexa skills into the Alexa skills store. Amazon first made it easy to create custom skills last year with its Alexa Skill Blueprints program, and it’s taking those custom responses and allowing them to be published in the store for everyone to download and use. There are currently more than 80,000 existing Alexa skills in the store, but today’s announcement means the store will be growing significantly with user-generated custom skills. Continue reading…
Amazon loaded up on low-risk government bonds last year as investors dumped tech stocks: Eugene Kim at CNBC reports that as investors dumped tech stocks in the fourth quarter of 2018 on concerns of rising interest rates, an emerging trade war with China and a looming government shutdown, Amazon followed suit and loaded up on low-risk government bonds. Amazon increased its US government and agency securities holdings by a record $6.8 billion in 2018, ending the year with $11.7 billion worth of the debt, the most ever, according to the company’s annual report. That’s more than double the amount Amazon had in the previous year, and the most as a percentage of total cash, equivalents and marketable securities (28%) since 2010. Continue reading…
Amazon’s legal woes grow as Austria probes online giant: Boris Groendahl at Bloomberg reports that Amazon’s twin role as dominant retailer and platform for smaller firms sparked an investigation into suspected unfair practices in Austria that closely mirrors a similar probe in Germany. The Austrian Federal Competition Authority (BWB) said it will examine whether Amazon is discriminating against stores using its platform and is favouring its own products on the Amazon marketplace. Continue reading…
Bonus: What FBA Sellers Need to Know About Amazon Sales Rank
Quote of the week:
“People who fail focus on what they have to go through; people who succeed focus on what it will feel like at the end.”
Tony Robbins
Have a great weekend!
