Amazon's full-year 2021 net sales reached $469.8 billion, up 22% year-on-year, with net profit of $33.4 billion (versus $21.3 billion in 2020) and earnings per share of $64.81. Fourth-quarter net sales were $137.4 billion (up 9% year-on-year — the first single-digit growth quarter since 2017), while Q4 net profit rose 98.6% to $14.3 billion, boosted by $11.8 billion in pre-tax investment gains including Amazon's stake in Rivian, which had gone public that November.
Advertising revenue, disclosed as a standalone line for the first time in this report, grew 32% year-on-year to $9.7 billion in Q4 alone — putting Amazon in third place in the U.S. ad market behind only Google ($61.2B Q4) and Facebook ($32.6B Q4).
Alongside the results, Amazon raised its U.S. Prime membership fee for the first time since 2018 — from $119 to $139 annually ($12.99 to $14.99 monthly) — while continuing to expand same-day and next-day delivery coverage (over 10 million items eligible for 1-day delivery, up roughly 10x since 2018). Against a backdrop of pandemic-driven labor shortages and rising logistics costs, Amazon said it had raised average worker pay to $18/hour with signing bonuses up to $3,000 in tight labor markets, and expanded its own port, vessel and warehousing capacity to keep pace with demand — context directly relevant to the many China-based sellers who depend on Amazon's fulfillment network for U.S. and European delivery.
