According to corporate records seen by Bloomberg, Amazon.com Inc.’s primary European retail division lost 1.16 billion euros ($1.26 billion) in 2021, allowing the company to pay no income tax and get 1 billion euros in tax rebates.
Last year, the Luxembourg-based company made 51.3 billion euros in sales, up 17 percent from 43.8 billion euros in 2020. The Amazon EU Sarl segment contains revenue from Amazon’s e-commerce operations in the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Poland, Sweden, and the Netherlands.
European regulators have been looking at Amazon’s tax methods. After regulators said deals with Luxembourg dating back to 2003 amounted to improper state aid, the Seattle-based corporation won an appeal on a 250 million-euro ($280 million) tax charge. The European Commission filed an appeal with the European Court of Justice last year.
According to an Amazon representative, the company is taxed in all of its European locations, and revenues, profits, and taxes are all recorded and submitted to local tax authorities in those locations. The documents reveal a rarely seen regional breakdown of Amazon’s finances.
The company earned $33.36 billion in global revenue in 2021, up from $21.3 billion the previous year. However, in its financial filings, the corporation does not break out e-commerce income and sales by country.
Across Europe, we pay corporate tax amounting to hundreds of millions of euros,” an Amazon spokesperson said. The 1 billion net tax gain is primarily due to the utilisation of net losses carried forward in conformity with the tax consolidation scheme, according to the papers.
Since 2013, the European Commission’s state-aid investigators have been looking for the most problematic examples of otherwise legitimate individual tax agreements — or tax judgements — given to businesses.
According to the paper, Amazon’s Luxembourg-based company employed 6,899 employees at the end of last year. The unit incurred a loss of 37 billion euros in “raw materials and consumables” and 15 billion in “external charges,” resulting in an annual loss of 15 billion euros.
Through technological innovation and huge size, Amazon has developed a reputation as a disruptor of well-established sectors. According to revenue and market share, it is the world’s largest online retailer and marketplace, smart speaker provider, cloud computing service provider through AWS, live-streaming service provider through Twitch, and Internet firm as of 2021.
Outside of China, it eclipsed Walmart as the world’s largest retailer in 2021, thanks in large part to Amazon Prime, a monthly subscription service with over 200 million subscribers globally. It is the United States’ second-largest private employer.
