Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has released his latest annual shareholder letter. Bezos has published a shareholder letter every year since 1997. The shareholder letter is considered a must-read by many business professionals. Jeff Bezos reveals Amazon has 100 million Prime members in letter to shareholders Wow. That's a lot. I remember reading somewhere that Amazon has/had over 100,000 people making more than $100,000/year from Amazon - authors, FBA, etc.
So, Amazon has told the world how much they earn from Prime, why not divulge what they earn thru selling KU memberships?
Because it’s probably not enough to brag about yet. Shareholder’s letters are mostly used to brag about how well a company is doing, even when its ... not. For the amount of revenue Amazon brings in, the profits are surprisingly low - because they tend to invest heavily in R&D and roll it back into the company. It has a tremendous benefit; things like the KU program, Amazon Video, and Amazon Music wouldn’t exist without it, and they’re developing a drone delivery service as well as paying to automate their warehouses. So their P&L sheet is what you want to pay attention to. But even that doesn’t typically have a super detailed breakdown, listing each and every thing on it. The detailed stuff is kept in house, and for good reason. But you can see just how profitable they are as a company here: AMZN Income Statement Last year, they made a little over $65 billion in gross profit on $177 billion in revenue, but their net profit was only $3 billion. With 100 million Prime memberships alone (let’s assume they all pay the cheaper $99/year for it), that’s $10 billion of their revenue right there. If they didn’t have AWS and Prime, they’d still be losing money, and in fact Q4 2017 was only their eighth quarter in a row of being profitable at all. All of that said, honestly I’m just thankful that KU exists at all, and so I’m not going to go giving this gift horse a dental checkup.
From what I know, the bulk of their money is from AWS (Amazon Web Services)... They just signed a huge deal with the D0D, I believe. The KU is lunch-money to them, I'm sure.
Yeah. They were saved for a couple of quarters by Prime revenue, but AWS is huge for them. That’s their main revenue source now.