Amazon slips into loss as productivity becomes focus

Amazon posted a net loss of $3.8bn (£3.0bn) in the first quarter versus income, or profits, of $8.1bn (£6.5bn) in the same period last year.

Amazon’s net sales climbed 7% to $116.4bn (£92.9bn) in the period, driven by its web services arm, AWS.

Chief executive Andy Jassy, who succeeded founder Jeff Bezos in the role last year, said: “The pandemic and subsequent war in Ukraine have brought unusual growth and challenges.

“With AWS growing 34% annually over the last two years, and 37% year over year in the first quarter, AWS has been integral in helping companies weather the pandemic and move more of their workloads into the cloud. Our consumer business has grown 23% annually over the past two years, with extraordinary growth in 2020 of 39% year over year that necessitated doubling the size of our fulfillment network that we’d built over Amazon’s first 25 years — and doing so in just 24 months.

“Today, as we’re no longer chasing physical or staffing capacity, our teams are squarely focused on improving productivity and cost efficiencies throughout our fulfillment network. We know how to do this and have done it before. This may take some time, particularly as we work through ongoing inflationary and supply chain pressures, but we see encouraging progress on a number of customer experience dimensions, including delivery speed performance, as we’re now approaching levels not seen since the months immediately preceding the pandemic in early 2020.”

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