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The good news, if you’re Amazon? You just sold £38.75 billion worth of stuff in 2012. That’s roughly the GDP of Croatia! The less good for you but pretty funny for everyone else news? You somehow lost £25 million doing it. Business!
While Amazon did turn a £61.5 million profit this most recent quarter, the most striking figures from today’s earnings report come from the full-year tally above. And while the Good Ship Bezos dropped some major change, bringing aboard robot company Kiva and snapping up Instant Video licensing agreements like candy canes at Christmas, that still doesn’t quite account for the order-of-magnitude gap between what it sold and what it earned.
What hurts the bottom line? The fact that its best-seller, the Kindle Fire HD, is a loss leader. Amazon Prime can’t help. And catching up to Netflix content offerings is a killer. Most of all, though, Amazon’s prime directive is still to get people under its tent, using its products, relying on its ecosystem. In other words: everything that makes Amazon one of the smartest, most patient companies in tech, also gives Amazon one of the silliest balance sheets. [Amazon]
Apple Made £8.3 Billion This Quarter, and Somehow That's a Disappointment
Amazon Manages to Lose £170 Million While Selling £8.5 Billion Worth of Stuff
Internet Bandits Somehow Steal More Than £100,000 in Bitcoin
So Apple’s profit for a quarter was only a couple of billion less than Amazon’s turnover for the year? That’s insane.
It must be terrifying being in the same market as Amazon. How can you compete against a competitor that has a pass from its shareholders to make no profit??
Actually no it wasn’t. Oh for an edit button, they only made 8.something billion. My second point still stands though.
While Amazon made a loss on paper, I doubt that it is actually running at a loss. Their loss probably has more to do with creative accounting to avoid paying tax then actually loosing money. Or maybe I’m just cynical.
Nope, legal creative accounting.
You’ll be amazed how easy it is.
It’s no rocket science why ALL these big companies make either minimal profits or losses, if you have associated companies outside of the UK.
All the Revenue do is ‘agree’ to things, because they don’t have the man power to do anything else with the big boys who in turn dictate.
Reminds me of Robocop and OCP…
Nah you’re not being cynical. I had a lecture the other day and your man said there’s only a few numbers you can trust on a account sheet – cash in the bank, the date and I can’t remember the third…
I think on this basis I am owed a massive tax rebate.
Amazon is buying billions worth of warehouses across the globe.
This was a planned hit taken on this year. Nobody’s surprised!
Easy. Same way Starbucks conned us out of tax: paying fees to a holding company registered elsewhere.
Made X amount of profit? Make your fee to the holding company of X that year. Result? No profit, no tax to pay. But your holding company (registered in a one-man office in Luxembourg or the Cayman Islands’ tax havens) makes a fortune – tax free.