Amazon announced today that it earned a net income of $14.3 billion on revenues of $137.4 billion in the fourth quarter of 2021. And to celebrate, it’s going to raise the price of its Amazon Prime subscription in the U.S. to help offset shipping higher shipping costs and wages.
“A big thank you to employees across Amazon who overcame another quarter of COVID-related challenges and delivered for customers this holiday season,” Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said. “Given the extraordinary growth we saw in 2020 when customers predominantly stayed home, and the fact that we’ve continued to grow on top of that in 2021, our retail teammates have effectively operated in peak mode for almost two years. It’s been a tremendous effort, and I’m appreciative and proud of how hard our teams have worked to serve customers.
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According to the firm, its AWS cloud services grew 40 percent year-over-year (YOY) and that business is now on a $71 billion annual run rate.
But it’s not all good news.
“As expected over the holidays, we saw higher costs driven by labor supply shortages and inflationary pressures, and these issues persisted into the first quarter due to Omicron,” Mr. Jassy explained. And it has some big entertainment properties coming on board this year, with The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power launching on Prime Video, while it becomes the exclusive home of Thursday Night Football as well. And those things aren’t going to pay for themselves.
And so Amazon is raising the price of Prime in the U.S. to $139 from $119 for annual plans and the monthly cost to $14.99 from $12.99. Amazon Prime has over 200 million members globally.
blue77star
<p>We made ton of people thanks to dumb people…because they are so stupid we are going to even raise the price. You have to be stupid to pay any type of subscription for companies like this. All you do is making them rich.</p>