Amazon Shareholder Letter 2019: Key Takeaways From Kiri Masters

The below is an excerpt from the latest Amazon Weekly News Digest by Bobsled CEO & Forbes contributor Kiri Masters, which is delivered via email to subscribers every Friday. 

Amazon recently released their 2019 Letter to Shareholders. Unsurprisingly, the vast majority of rhetoric delivered by Jeff Bezos was Covid-19 related. Here’s a few key takeaways.

Highlights from Amazon’s 2019 shareholder letter

AWS represents just 12% of sales, but 63% of Amazon’s profit.

Yes, cloud computing is a highly profitable business to be in. Yes, to some degree it helps to ‘fund’ investment in retail. Remember that 2019 was the year that Amazon rolled out 1-day shipping, a huge investment and hit on their retail profitability. That’s a distant memory now, as shoppers have lowered their expectations back down to multi-day or even multi-week delivery promises.

Amazon has closed over 6,000 seller accounts globally during
Covid-19 due to price gouging.

This looks to be a good thing for customers, but the automated system is far from perfect, and many brands have struggled to convince Amazon that prices have not deviated from before the pandemic kicked off. At Bobsled, we’ve tried a number of approaches to resolve this for clients and the guidance from Amazon has been contradictory, to say the least. So far there is not an action to take that consistently resolves these cases. We are opening appeals and leveraging our internal Amazon contacts now to resolve this issue.

If you are not a Bobsled client but have been affected by this issue, please reach out for a free consult to discuss your situation further.

Growth across all markets

Amazon's international business is only growing at 13% annually, whereas growth in North America (comprising USA, Mexico and Canada) grew 21% over the past year. However, the rate of growth slowed across all markets compared to prior years.

To read the letter to shareholders in full click here.

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