San Francisco (AFP)

Jeff Bezos invited shareholders to "sit down" on Thursday before announcing that his company, Amazon, would show no profit from April to June, and would spend the $ 4 billion in operating profit forecast this quarter for invest in crisis management.

His decision was sanctioned on the stock market, where his title lost some 4% in electronic exchanges after the close of Wall Street.

"If you are an Amazon shareholder, you should sit down, because we have big ambitions (to manage the coronavirus crisis)," said the billionaire in the first quarter earnings release.

The 4 billion that the company will accumulate in the spring will be used to compensate for the drop in productivity due to social distancing measures, but also to buy equipment (masks, etc.), to better clean logistics centers and to pay employees better. down the ladder.

Amazon also intends to develop its own group-wide virus testing infrastructure and its hundreds of thousands of employees.

As a leader in online commerce in the United States and elsewhere, Amazon immediately established itself as a key player in "Great Containment".

The group has already hired 175,000 additional people in its American warehouses to meet the increased demand, and pays 2 dollars / pounds / euros more per hour for this category of employees.

- "They will understand" -

In the first quarter, Amazon earned $ 75.5 billion in sales, up 26% year-on-year, but its net profit fell 29% to 2.5 billion.

"The current crisis demonstrates better than ever the adaptability and sustainability of our economic model, but it is also the most difficult period we have faced," commented Jeff Bezos.

For the second quarter, the group forecasts an increase in sales of between 18 and 28%, or revenues between 75 and 81 billion dollars.

"I trust our shareholders who are interested in the long term. They will understand and approve of our approach. In fact, they expect nothing less from us," said the boss.

The richest man in the world himself accumulated an additional $ 25 billion during the pandemic, according to Forbes magazine.

"There is a lot of uncertainty around the world right now and the best investment we can make is in the safety and well-being of our hundreds of thousands of employees," he added, while his group has had to face, in recent weeks, scattered social movements in the United States and Europe.

Last Monday, about 400 warehouse workers went on strike, according to the Athena association, to demand better protections and working conditions.

In France, Amazon has also suspended the activity of its distribution centers until May 5 after a court decision requiring it to assess the risks associated with the Covid-19 epidemic.

- "Strange quarter" -

"I don't think anyone can accuse Amazon of taking advantage of the virus," said Patrick Moorhead of Moor Insights & Strategy, citing the decline in net profit of $ 1 billion.

He said he was impressed by "the long list of initiatives to fight the Covid-19", but also by the performance of Amazon Web Services, the cloud division (remote computing).

AWS jumped 33% to cross the 10 billion mark of turnover - "just the growth of AWS in a quarter represents more than the annual revenues of many other players in the cloud," notes the analyst.

"We are accumulating future contracts for AWS around the world," said Brian Olsavsky, chief financial officer of Amazon, during the conference call for investors, assuring that this activity was not suffering from the current crisis.

Subscriptions are also doing well: they generated $ 5.6 billion, up 29%.

Prime, which allows free and fast delivery, and gives access to certain services such as the video streaming platform, is indeed well placed to attract customers who are confined to their homes.

Rest for Amazon to resolve certain difficulties in the supply chain and gradually regain the pace of delivery in one day, flagship measure implemented last year.

The second quarter is going to be "weird," admitted Brian Olsavsky. "Usually our biggest uncertainty is consumer demand, what products they will want and how much they will buy ... Now our biggest question is our ability to answer them."

© 2020 AFP