Justin Fox, Columnist

Amazon Isn't Just Spending Big Bucks on Groceries

The corporate giant has taken over research and development.

June 16, 2017 at 4:34 PM UTC

Justin Fox is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering business, economics and other topics involving charts. A former editorial director of the Harvard Business Review, he is author of “The Myth of the Rational Market.”

All Amazon, all the time.
Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg

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It didn't go totally unnoticed, but it probably deserves more attention than it has gotten: Amazon.com Inc. passed Volkswagen AG late last year to become the world's biggest corporate spender on research and development.

So an online retailer and entertainment provider with a big cloud computing operation -- which is also, we learned today, about to buy Whole Foods Market Inc. for $13.7 billion -- spent $17.4 billion on R&D over the 12 months ending in March. Well, sort of: Amazon doesn't actually report R&D spending. Instead, it has a line item under operating expenses for "technology and content," which it describes thusly in its financial reports: