How mighty will Amazon be after the pandemic?
It’s someone’s nightmare job: Amazon boss Jeff Bezos’s newspaper, the Washington Post, is seeking a special correspondent just to cover the billionaire’s online shopping and web services titan.
Having your own chronicler could be seen as the ultimate in billionaire egotism, but we are all close Amazon watchers now.
The group’s tentacles have spread into so many areas of our lives that it is almost impossible to escape – from its cloud storage technology that supports government services and numerous businesses, to its Prime subscription service tying clients into an “ecosystem” that ranges from film and music to shopping deliveries, to the Alexa-driven smart speakers that turn on lights and radios in many homes and search the internet while logging intimate user data.
Covid-19 may have knocked the sales and profits of many businesses, but Amazon was a standout pandemic winner, notching up millions of new recruits who turned to online streaming and shopping while shielding at home.
In Britain, 56% of households are now thought to have had access to Prime Video after almost 700,000 more people signed up in the final quarter of last year, according to analysts at Kantar.
On Thursday, Amazon will reveal the extent to which it has been able to hold on to those new customers as high streets reopened while the costs and complexities of serving shoppers increased.
Widespread supply chain hold-ups, with some factories shut during Covid scares and shipping routes disrupted, are expected to have affected its ability to obtain and deliver products. The cost of delivering has also gone up, as Amazon has had to battle for staff and invest in additional logistical kit amid a global surge in demand for home deliveries. In the UK, it increased
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