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> If you’re a shareowner in Amazon, you may want to take a seat, because we’re not thinking small. Under normal circumstances, in this coming Q2, we’d expect t
by txcwpalpha 6y ago
> If you’re a shareowner in Amazon, you may want to take a seat, because we’re not thinking small. Under normal circumstances, in this coming Q2, we’d expect to make some $4 billion or more in operating profit. But these aren’t normal circumstances. Instead, we expect to spend the entirety of that $4 billion, and perhaps a bit more, on COVID-related expenses getting products to customers and keeping employees safe. This includes investments in personal protective equipment, enhanced cleaning of our facilities, less efficient process paths that better allow for effective social distancing, higher wages for hourly teams, and hundreds of millions to develop our own COVID-19 testing capabilities
This seems huge. Spending all $4 billion of their expected Q2 profit on covid-19-related things, including developing their own tests.
Committing to spending all of your future profit (which seems like a huge statement on its own) aside, anyone know how this compares to what other companies (or even governments) are spending on safety/testing? Trying to get a sense for the scale here.
- kondro 6y agoAlthough, most of that $4B will probably be spent on finding and onboarding hundreds of thousands (175k so far) of new staff to deal with the demands on the retail business caused by COVID-19.
- lucasmullens 6y agoThey included "getting products to customers" in what they'll spend the 4 billion on, seems like they can include basically any cost in that.
- look_lookatme 6y agoConsidering I have been getting non-Amazon purchases much faster than Amazon purchases I suspect that's really code for paying for the delivery costs that exceeded the actuarial models that were baked into Amazon Prime and thus turned 1 day free delivery into 8 day free delivery.
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- MR4D 6y agoThis is leadership on an epic scale. I don’t know if any company putting 1/10 of that kind of money into an effort like that. (I’m excluding drug companies for obvious reasons.) As for governments, given the difference in measurements, it’s hard to compare. For instance, do you count lost tax revenue? I’d bet several states surpass that, and probably a few big cities come close (NYC & LA come to mind).