Not only the Russian government is at war with Internet services. While Roskomnadzor and the FSB are chasing the Telegram, Trump chose a more powerful rival for himself - the main and most profitable Internet shop. The Washington Post, which is owned by Jeff Bezos, has been writing about Trump since the presidential campaign. Now it's time to pay the bills. Trump seriously decided to destroy Amazon, or at least devalue the company as much as possible. In recent weeks, the stock price of the online store has fallen amid scandalous tweets and unexpected decisions by the head of the White House. Probably in the near future the dream of all the boys will come true, and we will be able to see who is stronger, the president of the United States - or the richest man on the planet.
Tweets go to battle
When you are the president of the United States, your Twitter is enough to derail the shares of any company. Back in 2016, Donald Trump decided that the Washington Post was “attacking” him by order of Jeff Bezos. Bezos himself says that he does not interfere in the politics of the newspaper, he simply gives money for its existence and independent investigations. But his unfriendliness to Trump has long been known. Once he said that he could launch Trump into space on his Blue Origin rocket. In response, Trump offered to disband his company, because Amazon is “too big” and this is a monopoly. About Google and Facebook, he did not make such remarks.
In December, Trump found another angle of attack. A part of deliveries from warehouses to homes by an Amazon client is done through the state postal service. Those, in any case, drive through the streets and deliver correspondence, and the online store “loads” their trucks, if they are not full, and it pays for it.
December 29, 2017 Trump shut up :
Why does the US Postal Service, losing billions of dollars a year, charge so little from Amazon and others for delivering their packages? Amazon is getting richer, and postal service is dumber and poorer? We must demand MUCH MORE!
The attacks intensified at the end of March, amid a growing scandal with Facebook and Cambridge Analytica, through which, presumably, Russia helped Trump win the election. The rest of the Capitol carried Zuckerberg, but the elder Donald maintained silence on this matter. Sources inside the White House told Axios that the president is “obsessed” only with an online store, and “asks if there is such an anti-trust law or competition law that allows you to do something with Amazon.”
Just the day after the release of the Axios publication, Trump went to fight on Twitter. He accused Amazon of paying too low taxes, using the state postal service (and therefore all taxpayers' money), and in general all sorts of "sucking" money from the United States.
March 29 :
... Unlike the others, they pay almost no taxes, use our Postal Service as their errand boy (causing enormous damage to the USA), and many thousands of retailers are bankrupt!
March 31 :
... US Post loses $ 1.50 on every parcel delivered to Amazon. This is billions of dollars. If Mail increases its rates, Amazon will pay another $ 2.6 billion, and they are now lobbying to avoid it. This fraud must stop. Amazon must pay real value (and taxes) now!
Regarding the increased spending on lobbying, Trump, by the way, is not far from the truth. From those. Amazon companies are now in the top 3. Google spends the most ($ 5.02 million in the first 3 months of 2018), Amazon ($ 3.38 million) and Facebook ($ 3.3 million). Their jumped costs of trying to influence lawmakers are associated with a rise in criticism of Internet companies, which began under the new president. While the oil and tobacco corporations in the amount so far spend more.
In April tweets, Trump blamed the postal service leaders for colluding with Amazon, and went on to say that the company is actually causing a loss to the American economy.
Amazon and USPS
The president is partly right: the US Postal Service is indeed in a terrible financial state. She annually loses a lot of money ($ 4-6 billion). In 2017, the USPS showed a profit, for the first time in six years, but this was due to staff reductions, the closure of part of the postal offices, and another refusal to pay debts. But the fact that this is due to the actions of Amazon, almost no one believes. The fact is that the US mail "subscribed" to work on a clear schedule, a la public transport. Each address must be serviced once a day, six days a week. Because of this, she has to maintain one of the largest staffs in the world (600,000), and pay them all government salaries and government pensions (in the same Amazon, the conditions for employees are not so funny ).
Losses associated primarily with reduced demand for paper correspondence. Americans began to send fewer letters (-29% from 1998 to 2008) because of the growing popularity of e-mail. Also increased competition from private companies, especially FedEx. A side job with delivery of parcels for Amazon, according to USPS representatives, allows them to reduce losses and increase the occupancy rate of postal trucks.
Trump seems to have received his information that the US Postal Service "loses $ 1.50 for each package" from an article in the same Wall Street Journal. One analyst associated with FedEx reported a loss of $ 1.46. The author of the article, when he was contacted, said that he did not specifically mean Amazon, but wrote about the total loss of the service on the delivery of parcels.
The Postal Service itself reported that the analyst’s opinion is wrong, and the delivery of goods is one of the most profitable business segments for her. They did not hear anything about the “losses” due to private companies. Now, according to the law, the Post is not allowed to charge for delivery below cost.
Jeff Wilke, the right hand of Jeff Bezos, now the manager of an online store (and in general, almost everyone at Amazon, except AWS), says that their relationship with the USPS is a win-win.
We survived four presidents. For more than two decades we have been working with the postal service in order to profitably deliver goods to customers and businesses throughout the United States. In the process we create a lot of jobs. It was a great partnership, and I hope we will be able to continue it further.
USPS needs Amazon for the so-called "last mile" (delivery from warehouses to customers' homes). So the company performs 40% of all orders in the United States. In some major cities, the Postal Service even started working on Sundays, because with Amazon it became profitable. If you remove the possibility of cooperation between the two companies, they both can lose billions. Amazon will have to quickly develop its own delivery services, or turn to FedEx.
Escalation
In 2017, Trump told Axios that of all the major IT companies, he likes Facebook, because there he can find his audience. Closest to him, advisers from the White House report that "he is an old-fashioned businessman who has become accustomed to the real, material world: real estate, paper newspapers, grocery stores." “President’s wealthy friends during golfing tell him that Amazon is destroying their traditional business. Many of his real estate buddies tell him that Amazon is killing shopping malls and taking retailers out of business, and he also holds that opinion. ”
In early April, Vanity Fair learned that Trump, not listening to advisers, offered to look for ways to attack the company. Including the investigation with the involvement of the FBI and the abolition of large state. contracts. Amazon with AWS is the only private cloud service provider for state-owned companies, including keeping sensitive information for the US Department of Defense, and this can be used against it.
As a result, on April 13 the order of the president was issued. Create a task force that will investigate the "operations and finances of the Postal Service." The document does not contain a word about Amazon, but an authorized group must give the state within 120 days. Authorities on how to improve the efficiency of the USPS. Probably, stopping the delivery of goods to third parties will be one of such recommendations.
One source close to Trump said:
This whole situation with the mail, he just such an idea. He was told many times at meetings that this idea was wrong, and that mail actually receives a lot of money from Amazon, but his opinion will not change.
The US government also intends to block any new purchases of an online store in order to prevent the Amazon Empire from growing. Already, this company alone is more expensive than all the other major American retailers combined. "President Trump believes that this could be a threat to the country's security."
Based on Bloomberg , Axios and The Verge .
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