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Comment by Borlands | Hacker News Reader

“The Luxembourg unit (...) employs just 5,262 staff meaning that the income per employ amounts to €8.4m“

This puts things into perspective/scale.

Except that it's wrong: _revenue_ may be €8.4m per employee, but that's not the same thing as income. In a low-margin retail business like Amazon's, of course the revenues will be high, but almost all of that is compensated for by costs of revenue.

amazon isn't only retail. It is a logistics company. A data center company. An insurance company....

A Company "Making" Everything? Or ACME for short?

Frankly, this is bullshit. If Amazon's business was such low margin, then how have they been able to have so much growth?

The only answer, is that it isn't actually as low margin as commonly stated and instead we have a tax system with loopholes that allow businesses to make a "profit" but by "reinvesting" in themselves they don't have to pay any taxes.

Because they cross-subsidise their unprofitable new markets with their profitable established markets, so overall the company makes (historically) a net loss. It's been a great strategy for Amazon and it is what the tax system is meant to incentivise - economic development instead of extraction.

And if you put a holding company above a profitable company, and the holding company has 1 employee, then it makes billions per employee.

There's no reason to think this gives any perspective.

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