Amazon.com has released its first-quarter highlights ending March 31, 2022. According to Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, the pandemic and Ukraine crisis have resulted in unexpected growth and challenges.
- Amazon launched the Amazon Industrial Innovation Fund (AIIF), a $1 billion venture investment initiative that will invest in companies developing supply chain, logistics, and fulfilment technologies. The Amazon Industrial Innovation Fund will invest in boosting delivery speed and improving warehouse and logistics worker experience.
- Amazon launched 37 new renewable energy projects around the world, marking substantial progress toward its ambitious goal of using renewable energy to power 100 percent of corporate activities by 2025—five years ahead of the initial target of 2030. The new projects nearly triple Amazon’s overall capacity and solidify Amazon’s position as the world’s largest corporate consumer of renewable energy, with 310 renewable energy projects in 19 countries and 15.7 gigatonnes of clean energy capacity—enough to power 3.9 million US households annually.
- Amazon and Sun Mobility, a local supplier of energy infrastructure and services for electric cars (EVs) in India, announced an increased deployment of EVs with battery-swapping technology, which removes the need for lengthy recharging. These EVs will be used in Amazon’s transportation and logistics services, and will help Amazon India meet its ambition to add 10,000 electric cars to its delivery fleet by 2025.
- Boeing, a worldwide maker of aircraft and space systems, chose AWS as a key cloud provider to provide technologies to enable more powerful, sustainable, and efficient aerospace design, engineering, and management solutions. Boeing will run high-performance computing workloads on AWS and expects to migrate many of its critical apps there. Boeing will use AWS to streamline its cloud computing approach while it undertakes ambitious engineering feats such as designing a more sustainable future of flight.
- Nearly 100 new signatories to The Climate Pledge have joined Amazon, including HARMAN, Maersk, SAP, Sunrun, and Weyerhaeuser. With the addition of the new signatories, the total number of companies pledging to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2040 now exceeds 300. Pledge signatories generate more than $3.5 trillion in worldwide yearly sales and employ over 8 million people across 51 industries in 29 countries.
“The pandemic and subsequent war in Ukraine have brought unusual growth and challenges,” said Andy Jassy, Amazon CEO. “With AWS growing 34% annually over the last two years, and 37% year-over-year in the first quarter, AWS has been integral in helping companies weather the pandemic and move more of their workloads into the cloud.”
“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 fulfillment 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 fulfillment 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.”
