Amazon doubles its profit to $14 billion by the end of the year

Amazon has been one of the big winners from the pandemic.

Health restrictions linked to the Covid-19 epidemic have led consumers who are still reluctant to adopt e-commerce en masse.

REUTERS - Rick Wilking

Text by: RFI Follow

2 mins

Amazon's profits doubled in the fourth quarter of 2021 from a year earlier.

Despite the lack of manpower, the e-commerce giant has earned a net profit of more than 14.3 billion dollars. 

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Several factors explain this very good performance.

Amazon has been one of the big winners from the pandemic.

Health restrictions have led consumers who are still reluctant to adopt e-commerce en masse, starting with the Seattle group and its promises of ultra-fast delivery, and cloud-based services, of which it is the world leader. 

And the habits taken in 2020 seem set to last: the e-commerce giant earned nearly $470 billion in revenue (+21%) and made more than $33 billion in net profit in 2021, an increase of 57%. . 

Amazon has also indicated that it had its "best sales weekend" during the Black Friday and Cyber ​​Monday sales at the end of November (the Friday and Monday after the American Thanksgiving holiday).

Boosted by Rivian and juicy cloud contracts

Other reasons for its success: the choice of its investments.

Amazon, which is a major shareholder in electric vehicle maker

, benefited from its big splash on Wall Street in November

Amazon's profits were also boosted by its rapidly increasing advertising revenues and by AWS, its cloud service, which signed juicy contracts with the Nasdaq and also with Meta for its networks and messengers Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp on the three last months of 2021. The company expects revenue of between $112 billion and $117 billion for the current quarter, representing growth of 3 to 8% year-on-year.

Declining profitability

These good results made it possible to cope with the 4 billion dollars of additional expenditure to replace in the last quarter of 2021 many employees affected by Covid-19, the difficulties in the supply chain and high inflation.

In the fourth quarter, its operating profit, a key indicator of profitability, stood at 3.5 billion dollars, half less than a year ago.

But the Amazon boss assured that these costs would be lower in the coming months, and that he intended to improve the efficiency and pace of operations to deliver faster than before the pandemic.

Amazon

now employs more than 1.6 million people worldwide.

The company said the starting wage for warehouse and logistics center workers now exceeds $18 an hour in the United States.

An argument that she will not fail to make in the face of

in Staten Island, New York, and also in Bessemer, Alabama.

If successful, it would be the first union in an Amazon warehouse in the United States.

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