Amazon is struggling to back grocery business.

The boss of Amazon has pledged to increase investment in the company’s struggling grocery business, less than

a fortnight after announcing that its growth plans had been put on hold. Initially an online marketplace for books, it has grown into an international group selling its own products, such as Alexa and Kindle tablets, and setting up Amazon Studios, a television streaming division. Amazon has tried to make inroads into food and grocery for several years, initially via its Amazon Fresh online delivery service, then through its acquisition of Whole Foods for $13.7 billion and more recently with the launch of its Amazon Fresh supermarkets and Amazon Go cashier-less stores. Jassy, 55, said a lack of «normalcy» in the pandemic had prevented Amazon from getting its grocery proposition right the first time round.

Martin Heubel, an Amazon strategy consultant and the former senior category manager for food, snacks and coffee at Amazon, said the Fresh business was still in «maintenance mode». «Although Amazon Fresh shops offer their private-label range in almost every product category, they still rely heavily on branded items to drive customer footfall». Amazon «had to learn the hard way that the price of a product is more important to consumers than its innovative offering of checkout-free stores», he said.

www.sba.tax

Comments

Cloud Bookkeeping

HS2 cost cuts new routes and add delays.

Transport department officials have begun work on «Project Silverlight» suggesting the highspeed rail scheme might face four additional years of delay. The planned High Speed 2 rail line faces further delays of up to four years and more cuts to the project under plans being drawn up by ministers to rein in its ballooning costs. The extra delays to the country’s biggest infrastructure project would mean that it would not be completed until as late as 2045 — 12 years after originally planned. «This is a function of inflation; we are having to find huge savings because the cost of everything the department is already doing will have become so much more expensive by then,» said one government official. In October, the FT reported that the Treasury had asked HS2’s management team to identify potential cuts or «scope reductions» to the high-speed line. Transport department officials have subsequently begun work on Project Silverlight aimed at fi...

Google has launched its Bard chatbot.

Google has launched its Bard chatbot in a move to rival OpenAI’s popular ChatGPT, as it seeks to make up lost ground in the race to commercialise generative artificial intelligence technology. Google said that Bard, which provides answers to textbased questions, will be run separately from its Google Search engine. In recent weeks, generative AI has also been integrated into widely used productivity applications, such as Google’s Workspace including Google Docs and Gmail, and Microsoft’s Office 365 software, as well as into popular apps such as Duolingo, allowing millions of people to start interacting with the technology. «We want to get feedback and gradually phase up the number of people who have access to Bard, and the reason for that is we want to be able to test and learn from that before we roll it out very widely,» said Zoubin Ghahramani, vice-president of Google Research. Bard is built on top of Google’s AI technology known a...

Doubt on CS's collateral.

Credit Suisse provided an emergency $140mn loan to Greensill Capital based partly on invoices to companies that deny ever doing the business stated on the documents. The Swiss bank provided the loan in October 2020, less than five months before the collapse of Greensill, a supply chain finance firm that counted former British prime minister David Cameron as a senior adviser. Invoices issued by metals magnate Sanjeev Gupta’s Liberty Commodities and sold to Greensill formed part of the collateral for the loan, according to documents seen by the Financial Times and people familiar with the transaction. Yet several of the parties named on the invoices have told the FT they did no business with Liberty. GFG has consistently denied any wrongdoing. Credit Suisse’s loan had a clause dictating that the collateral value had to be equal to or greater than the $140mn borrowed. The terms of the debt agreement only allowed invoices on Green-sill’s balance sheet to count towards this tally if t...

Search This Blog