Amazon, Bill Gates-backed group join hands to deliver coronavirus test kits

Amazon.com Inc is teaming up with a research program funded by Bill Gates to pick up and deliver coronavirus test kits in Seattle, the e-commerce giant said on Monday.

The Seattle Coronavirus Assessment Network, a group of medical, public health and research organizations, is collecting nasal swabs from a sample of people across King County and Seattle to learn how the infection is spreading in the areas.

 

ALSO READ: Amazon raises overtime pay for warehouse staff, Bezos 'ocused on COVID-19'

King County, part of Washington state, is one of the worst hit places by the outbreak in the United States.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on Monday reported 33,453 cases of coronavirus in the country, an increase of 18,185 cases from its previous count, and said the death toll had risen by 199 to 400.

Amazon Care, the e-commerce giant's arm that provide medical care to employees, along with other delivery partners will provide infrastructure and logistics services to the effort, according to SCAN's website.

 

ALSO READ: India's e-commerce sector comes to halt due to lockdowns

United Parcel Service and FedEx have arms that specialize in such shipments, which require special handling including temperature controls. It was not immediately clear whether UPS and FedEx were part of the effort.

CNBC first reported about the move, which Amazon said is limited to Amazon Care and does not involve its broader delivery network.

Amazon opens its largest campus building in Hyderabad to take on Walmart

Amazon.com Inc. on Wednesday opened its largest campus building globally in the south Indian city of Hyderabad as it prepares for a furious expansion and battle with nemesis Walmart Inc. in one of the world’s fastest-growing retail markets.

The Seattle-headquartered company is making an ambitious push in India, the last major retail frontier still primarily reliant on small-scale neighborhood and mom-and-pop stores. “E-commerce is so small in India relative to the total consumption, less than 3%,” said Amit Agarwal, Amazon’s country manager for India.

The largely untapped country is critical to the global domination plans of both Amazon and Walmart, the latter of which spent $16 billion last year to buy India’s biggest startup, retailer Flipkart Online Services Pvt. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has so far pledged $5.5 billion for its India operations.

Built in Hyderabad over three years, the new campus is Amazon’s first owned building outside of the United States, spans 1.8 million square feet of office space and will accommodate 15,000 workers. “The largest buildings in Seattle house about 5,000 employees,” remarked John Schoettler, vice president of Amazon’s Global Real Estate and Facilities. He said the campus was Amazon’s largest in the world but has plenty more room to grow.

“This facility will build services globally,” Agarwal added, citing examples like AWS, Kindle, Alexa, Amazon.in and Amazon Home Services, which is “innovating on things like doorstep pick-up and electronics repair.”

At the same time as it’s inaugurating its new Indian hub, Amazon is investing on other fronts within the nation. It is in negotiations to buy a 10% stake in one of India’s largest brick & mortar retailers, Future Retail, people familiar with the matter have said. Local media have also reported that Amazon is eager to add food delivery to its Indian repertoire and is negotiating with multiple food companies to kick-start that line of business.

Amazon started its retail operations in India in 2013 and has since added several services to boost sales, including an expansion into producing Bollywood originals to boost its Prime Video loyalty program in the movie-loving country. Prime membership in India has doubled over the past 18 months, according to Agarwal, and he still sees “tremendous growth” going forward.

At $993 bn, Amazon just a whisker away from touching $1 trn valuation again

Amazon.com Inc is flirting with a $1 trillion valuation again after posting its longest winning streak since briefly surpassing that level in September.

Seven consecutive days of gains have boosted the e-commerce giant’s market value to $993 billion as of Wednesday’s close, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. A gain of less than 1% for the stock would push the market capitalization above the 10-figure mark.

Amazon has added about $119 billion in market value since the end of May. Nearly half of those gains have come in the past seven days, which comprises Amazon’s longest string of advances since September 4.

Microsoft Corp is currently the only company with a market value above $1 trillion. Apple Inc. was long the world’s largest company, but hasn’t regained all of the market value it lost late last year amid concerns about demand for the iPhone, its top selling product, and the US trade war with China. Apple has a current market valuation of $935 billion, down from an October record of $1.12 trillion.

Amazon offered jobs to Pentagon employees to get cloud contract: Lawsuit

At least two Pentagon employees were offered jobs at Amazon.com Inc. while working on the Defense Department’s $10 billion cloud contract, a lawsuit filed by Oracle Corp. alleges.

The amended complaint, made public on Tuesday, claims Deap Ubhi, a former employee at a high-level Defense Department technology unit, helped design the cloud contract in a way that was favorable to Amazon even after receiving “significant” job and bonus offers from the e-commerce giant.

Oracle’s latest court action comes weeks after the Pentagon announced it had eliminated Oracle and International Business Machines Corp. from the bidding because they didn’t meet the minimum criteria, leaving Amazon and Microsoft Corp. as the last remaining competitors.

The Pentagon, which announced the Jedi competition in March of last year, doesn’t expect to award the contract before July 19.

Ubhi, who had worked at Amazon before joining the government, helped craft the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, or JEDI, procurement for weeks after accepting a job offer in October 2017 from Amazon Web Services, the company’s cloud unit, according to the lawsuit. Ubhi then made up an “elaborate lie” about an Amazon offer to buy his startup company, Tablehero, when he “belatedly” recused himself from working on the contract, the lawsuit alleges.

The lawsuit also contends that an unnamed former official connected with the Navy participated in the JEDI contracting process even after accepting a position with Amazon Web Services.

Ubhi is still employed by Amazon Web Services, according to his Twitter account.

An Amazon representative didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment. The Defense Department declined to comment.

Efforts to reach Ubhi through multiple emails and by telephone were unsuccessful.

Oracle first filed its lawsuit in December in the US Court of Federal Claims, alleging the Pentagon crafted overly narrow contract requirements and failed to investigate relationships between former Defense Department employees and Amazon.

The newest allegations may bolster Oracle’s argument that terms for the cloud project violate federal procurement standards.

The cloud project involves transitioning massive amount of Defense Department data to a commercially-operated cloud system.

Oracle’s lawsuit also made conflict-of-interest allegations about Anthony DeMartino, a former deputy chief of staff in the secretary of defense’s office. DeMartino had previously consulted for Amazon Web Services before assuming his role at the Pentagon.

In February, a judge paused court proceedings in the case to allow the Pentagon to review new information about potential conflicts of interests.

In November, the US Government Accountability Office rejected Oracle’s conflict-of-interest allegations in a separate protest. The watchdog agency said the evidence it reviewed indicated that neither DeMartino nor Ubhi had substantive input into the contract’s terms or the procurement process.

Tech companies including Oracle banded together in an informal coalition last year to urge the Defense Department to split the contract among several suppliers.

They said the winner-take-all approach would lock the Pentagon into a single vendor and would heighten security risks. The department has said that making multiple awards under current acquisition law would be a slow process that could prevent it from quickly delivering new capabilities.

Oracle Executive Vice President Kenneth Glueck, who leads the company’s Washington lobbying operation, said in a recent interview with Bloomberg News that the company will continue to challenge requirements for the contract in conversations with lawmakers on Capitol Hill.

“You read the RFP and it just screams Amazon,” Glueck said, referring to the Defense Department’s request for proposals. “The RFP emphasizes all the things Amazon is very good at” and “completely de-emphasizes the things they’re not very good at.”

Amazon's rise in ad searches dents google's dominance

Advertisers are starting to shift spending on search ads from Alphabet Inc.’s Google toward Amazon.com Inc., a sign of how the online retailer is capitalizing on becoming the top destination for consumers’ product searches.

WPP PLC, the world’s largest ad buyer, spent about $300 million on behalf of its clients on Amazon search ads last year, and about 75% of that money came from Google search budgets, according to people familiar with the matter. It spent between $100 million and $150 million on Amazon search in 2017, the people said.

WPP spent north of $3 billion globally on Google search advertising last year, one of the people said.

Omnicom Group Inc., another Madison Avenue giant, said between 20% and 30% of the dollars its clients spent on search advertising last year went to Amazon search ads, with the majority of the cash shifted from Google search budgets. The New York ad company spent about $1.2 billion on U.S. search ads last year, according to people familiar with its ad spending.

Amazon still has a long way to go to catch Google, which had 78% of the $44.2 billion U.S. search-ad market in 2018, according to research firm eMarketer.

But the shift in spending follows a major change in shopper behavior: While Google has long been the dominant player in online searches of all sorts, some 54% of people looking for a product now begin their search directly on Amazon, a jump from 46% in 2015, according to Jumpshot, a research firm that collects data from 100 million devices.

“Consumers are no longer double hopping between Google and Amazon, they just go straight to Amazon,” said Scott Hagedorn, chief executive officer of Omnicom Media Group North America, the ad-buying division of Omnicom.

The search-ad dollars shifting to Amazon are from companies that sell products on its platform, such as consumer packaged goods manufacturers and retailers, Mr. Hagedorn said. Google and Amazon declined to comment.

The eMarketer firm doesn’t have a precise figure for Amazon’s search-ad revenue or how much it has increased, but estimates it will account for at least half of Amazon’s $11.3 billion in overall ad revenue this year.

That would mean Amazon would take the No. 2. slot in U.S. search advertising, vaulting substantially ahead of Microsoft Corp., which is expected to have 6.7% of the market this year.

Spending on Google search ads continues to grow and is expected to be up 17% this year to $40 billion, according to eMarketer. However, Google’s market share is expected to slip to 71% by 2020 as Amazon grows, according to the research firm.

Ad agency executives said Amazon’s strength is its ability to tell advertisers if their ads have led to purchases on its site.

“The shift from Google to Amazon search is simple; Amazon has the audience, the transaction, and the loyalty to Amazon Prime, which clients can capitalize on,” said Shane Atchison, chief executive officer of North American operations at WPP’s Wunderman Thompson.

Amazon’s advertising ambitions have steadily grown. Beyond search, it offers other opportunities for marketers including display ads, TV-like ads in live sports telecasts and targeted ads it serves to people as they travel around the web.

Overall, it is now the third-largest digital ad player behind Google and Facebook Inc.—the “duopoly” that combined controls about 60% of U.S. online spending. Search ads on Amazon are called “sponsored ads,” and companies bid in an auction-based system to have their product ads show up when a person types in a search term like “shampoo.”

Men’s grooming product maker Oars + Alps LLC was using Google search ads last year but has shifted most of its search-ad spending to Amazon. Its monthly ad outlays with Amazon now top $20,000.

“I was amazed at the return on ad spending on Amazon, so I lowered our spending in Google search,” said Laura Cox, co-founder of Oars + Alps, which sells its products at Target, Amazon.com and on its own website.

Ad executives said money for increased spending on Amazon search ads is also coming from other ad and marketing budgets, including in-store promotions and ads, and display ads.

Dentsu Aegis Network, another major ad buyer, said its Amazon search-ad spending in the U.S. increased upward of 60% last year but only a small portion of the money likely came from budgets previously earmarked for Google.

Amazon doesn’t sell search ads to companies that don’t sell their products on its site, such as financial services, insurance and automobile companies—categories that continue to fuel Google search, ad buyers said.

In a move that could help it lure more search dollars, Amazon is testing video search ads.

“Where they have had more challenges is bringing in more brand-building type advertisers, and video could help achieve that,” said Vin Paolozzi, executive vice president of innovation at Interpublic’s ad-buying arm, Magna Global.

The rush of ad dollars to Amazon does have a downside: a big jump in ad prices in competitive categories such as consumer products, ad buyers said. The cost per click on the search term “laundry detergent liquid,” for example, was $17.51 last month, a 127% increase from September, according to Pacvue, which provides tools for brands to optimize Amazon ads.

“Amazon was extremely inexpensive” a few years ago but the influx of brands has caused a “significant increase in pricing,” said Melissa Burdick, co-founder of Pacvue.

Some brands remain leery of the company, viewing it as a competitor. Even as it helps other brands market their own products, Amazon is increasingly hawking its own private labels as well.

“I have to pay them for a top placement [in search results], I have to give them a cut of the money that I might generate if that product is sold, and Amazon might try to market their own private label for the exact product that the customer is looking for,” said Deren Baker, chief executive officer of Jumpshot. “If I was an advertiser, I would be a bit worried.”