Friday, 30 Oct 2020 08:16 AM MYT
A company executive added that heightened spending on delivery infrastructure would likely continue over years, and shares fell 2 per cent in after-hours trading. Amazon's response now includes an estimated US$4 billion in costs related to Covid-19 this holiday, up from US$2.5 billion last quarter. It is testing employees for the virus and getting protective gear for new hires.
Competition this holiday remains fierce for the company in retail — and in the cloud. A traditional bright spot, cloud computing division Amazon Web Services is dueling with smaller rival Microsoft Corp for business with a big potential during the pandemic, from remote work to cloud-based gaming. The question for some analysts has been whether Amazon's consumer division can keep up with still-growing purchases during the pandemic.
“We do think it will be tight on capacity industry-wide, and we’re no exception to that,” he said. “It does behoove shoppers to shop early.”