Last year, the Luxembourg-based company made 51.3 billion euros in sales, up 17 percent from 43.8 billion euros in 2020. The Amazon EU Sarl segment contains revenue from Amazon’s e-commerce operations in the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Poland, Sweden, and the Netherlands.
According to corporate records seen by Bloomberg, Amazon.com Inc.’s primary European retail division lost 1.16 billion euros ($1.26 billion) in 2021, allowing the company to pay no income tax and get 1 billion euros in tax rebates.
Last year, the Luxembourg-based company made 51.3 billion euros in sales, up 17 percent from 43.8 billion euros in 2020. The Amazon EU Sarl segment contains revenue from Amazon’s e-commerce operations in the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Poland, Sweden, and the Netherlands.
European regulators have been looking at Amazon’s tax methods. The Seattle-based corporation won an appeal against a tax levy of 250 million euros ($280 million) levied after regulators determined that deals with Luxembourg dating back to 2003 constituted improper state aid. The European Commission filed an appeal with the European Court of Justice last year.
According to an Amazon representative, the company is taxed in all of its European locations, and revenues, profits, and taxes are all recorded and submitted to local tax authorities in those locations.
The documents reveal a rarely seen regional breakdown of Amazon’s finances. The company earned $33.36 billion in global revenue in 2021, up from $21.3 billion the previous year. However, in its financial filings, the corporation does not break out e-commerce income and sales by country.
“Across Europe, we pay corporate tax amounting to hundreds of millions of euros,” an Amazon representative said. The 1 billion net tax gain is “mainly due to the use of net losses carried forward in accordance with the tax consolidation system.”
Since 2013, the European Commission’s state-aid investigators have been looking for the most problematic examples of otherwise legitimate individual tax agreements — or tax judgements — given to businesses.
According to the paper, Amazon’s Luxembourg-based company employed 6,899 employees at the end of last year. The unit incurred a loss of 37 billion euros in “raw materials and consumables” and 15 billion in “external charges,” resulting in an annual loss of 15 billion euros.
“We are investing heavily in creating jobs and infrastructure across Europe – more than 100 billion euros since 2010”, an Amazon representative said, adding “Corporation tax is based on profits, not revenues, and last year Amazon EU Sarl made a loss as we opened more than 50 new sites across Europe and created over 65,000 well-paid jobs, taking our total European permanent workforce to over 200,000.”
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