The year 2015 has been a period of spending and acquisitions for Amazon, as the e-commerce major spent about $690 million to acquire a plethora of companies in 2015. The data has been revealed, thanks to its yearly filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Amazon filed its reports to the commission earlier today, according to which it spent most of the $600 plus million through cash.
Amazon’s yearly acquiring spree was certainly reduced compared to the figures of 2014. In its previous filings, Amazon reported that it used $862 million of its capital to acquire different companies in 2014. For this year, about $842 million was spent through cash to acquire the live streaming site Twitch.
Even though the capital spent on acquiring companies was still significant for 2015, Amazon displayed some variety in its acquisitions.
It’s most noteworthy acquisition for the year 2015 was its purchase of Annapurna Labs, a chipmaker based in Israel. Amazon acquired the company after spending a total amount of $350 million. After spending a hefty sum on the chipmaker’s acquisition, Amazon purchased Elemental Technologies for around $296 million. Elemental Technologies is a video processing company based in Portland. It was initially speculated that the deal will cost Amazon close to $500 million.
Amazon’s also acquired Cluster K, a start-up specialising in cloud technology in the same year. Shoefitr, a 3D shoe-fitting technology start-up, Amiato, a database migration start-up, 2lemetry, a start-up that focuses on the Internet of Things and finally Safaba Translation Systems, a text translation software provider were Amazon’s other acquisitions for the year 2015.
Its publication of the quarterly reports had an adverse effect on its stocks, as the shares of Amazon nosedived just hours after the publication. In the report, Amazon claimed a 22 percent surge in net sales, accounting for $35.7 billion. The e-commerce giant posted an impressive 125 percent increase in profits for the same quarter. With respect to its Prime subscriptions, Amazon claimed that it has registered a 51 percent increase and about 69 percent increase in the sales of its Amazon Web Services.
All this spending and reported figures of increased profits has helped Amazon further increase its employee base by 8,400 in the last quarter of 2015. This expansion takes its overall tally of employees to about 230,000 globally.
