Amazon Spends Billions on R&D. Just Don't Call It That.
The company that doesn’t want to emphasize research and development may be putting more money into it than any other on earth.
T&C is the new R&D
Photographer: Bloomberg
Along with the news that founder and long-time Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos “will transition to the role of Executive Chair in the third quarter of 2021,” Amazon.com Inc.’s fourth-quarter earnings release included the remarkable if not exactly surprising disclosure that the company had spent $42.7 billion on “technology and content” in 2020, up 19% from the year before and up 242% from just five years earlier.
Technology and content is the line item in the company’s consolidated statement of operations that encompasses research and development, and Amazon’s spending on it is generally reported in the media and elsewhere as R&D. It’s not the same, however, as what other companies report as R&D. In the 10-K annual report Amazon filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission last week, the company defined technology and content as: