AMZN will continue to increase since the company is so innovative. Recently, AMZN is trying to increase the price of Prime since it saw strong gains on its retail segment. Retail sales increased 46% year-on-year to $30.7 billion this quarter. Besides, Amazon Web Services grew 49% to $5.4 billion. This level of growth is astounding for a company that generates over $5 billion from infrastructure-as-a-service. The cloud business had operating income of $1.4 billion in the quarter, representing a margin of 26%. So, it's better to hold it for at least 3 years.
Alexa Indiscretion An Amazon Echo device was apparently incorrectly triggered by part of a conversation that its owners were having, so it recorded their conversation and sent it to one of their contacts. Amazon has confirmed the incident and said it is trying to ensure that this won't happen again. But the episode at least gives a bad impression, given that Amazon insists its Alexa virtual assistant isn't always listening to what goes on around it. Wall Street Journal
Though Amazon is said to have confirmed the incident, I don't think they will be able to confirm that the incident could happen. I think this is going to turn out to be a fabrication.
Postal service’s pricing methodology upheld by appeals court The U.S. Postal Service’s method to set prices for competitive services was upheld by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit last week. The ruling comes in the wake of President Donald Trump’s assertion that USPS doesn’t charge Amazon.com enough to deliver its packages. (www.ttnews.com)
Whole Foods Truth Whole Foods CEO John Mackey says sales are booming since the Amazon takeover, but "I'm sure that Amazon has probably gotten more disagreement from me than any other single person and possibly more than everyone else combined." That's per a leaked recording of an internal companywide meeting. It's not clear what the disagreements were about, but he added: "Amazon has listened, and they have been very respectful, and they have backed off." Business Insider
Bezos Philanthropy Jeff Bezos has crowdsourced two ideas for his big venture into the world of philanthropy, and will reveal them later this summer. We know little about them apart from the fact that they're designed to make an impact in the short term. Given Amazon's well-known antipathy towards official homelessness programs in Seattle, and the way it's been criticized for not paying workers a real living wage in many places, there are certainly lots of social impacts Bezos's $140 billion fortune could make. Fortune