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Comment by sokoloff | Hacker News Reader

$5B is around 1% of their (current) trailing 4 quarter revenue, which I would say is "not outrageous" if voice/home assistants is an area of growth and investment for Amazon.

Why would a 2022 article be citing a 2018 loss figure for a almost surely (if my house is any indication) fast-growing segment?

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Amazon's hallmark in the past has been investing big into businesses without immediate profits. Amazon gets massive revenue but has nowhere near the margins of an Apple, or Google. As you know, a net loss and revenue are not apples to apples. For full year 2018, Amazon had net income of $10B on $232B of revenue.

All of which is to say that a $5B loss is a very material number. They obviously thought it would be a big profit driver in the future, which it has not turned out to be yet.

Amazon doesn’t release info about the Alexa category in their earnings, so any reporting can only rely on whatever figure has been leaked.

That seems like reporting on Meta's 2022 losses in virtual reality in late 2026, which would seem absurd, even if that's the best/only information they have at that time. (At some point, you have to admit "we don't have any relevant information" rather than report on "the least irrelevant information we can find".)

The story does note how old the figure is, so readers can take it with a grain of salt as appropriate.

You could think of reporting on selective leaks like this as kind of a needling for Amazon to release more up-to-date info.

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