Amazon reports first loss since 2015 on back of shares collapse in electric vehicle firm

Amazon has reported its first loss since 2015, losing $3.8bn (£3bn) for the first quarter of 2022 compared with a profit of $8.1bn (£6.5bn) during the same period a year ago. 

C.e.o. Andy Jassy  said the pandemic and war in Ukraine had brought "unusual growth and challenges” and referred to ongoing inflationary and supply chain pressures. 

Amazon’s stake in electric vehicle company Rivian was largely to blame for the loss. The online retailer owns nearly 20% of the company and lost $7.6bn (£6.1bn) after shares in the electric vehicle collapsed by more than 50%. But a drop in online sales and rising costs also contributed to Amazon’s latest results.  

Overall sales rose 7% to $116.4bn (£92.7bn) in the three months to 31st March, powered by Amazon Web Services (AWS), the company’s cloud-computing division, but this is Amazon’s slowest growth rate in nearly two decades. For the same quarter last year, sales increased 44% to $108.5bn (£86.4bn).  

Jassy’s statement focused on the company’s progress and AWS’s ability to help “companies weather the pandemic and move more of their workloads into the cloud”.  

He said: “Our consumer business has grown 23% annually over the past two years, with extraordinary growth in 2020 of 39% year-over-year that necessitated doubling the size of our fulfilment network that we’d built over Amazon’s first 25 years—and doing so in just 24 months.

“Today, as we’re no longer chasing physical or staffing capacity, our teams are squarely focused on improving productivity and cost efficiencies throughout our fulfilment network. We know how to do this and have done it before. This may take some time, particularly as we work through ongoing inflationary and supply chain pressures, but we see encouraging progress on a number of customer experience dimensions, including delivery speed performance as we’re now approaching levels not seen since the months immediately preceding the pandemic in early 2020.” 

The company warned there might be more losses ahead. For the current quarter, Amazon expects operating income to show a loss between $1bn (£796m) and a gain of $3bn (£2.4bn), compared with $7.7bn (£6.1bn) in the second quarter of 2021.