The news: Amazon received about $600 million in tariff refunds in the second quarter, CFO Brian Olsavsky said on the earnings call. He called it "the significant majority of refunds we expect to receive."
That is a modest recovery for a company that booked $200.6 billion in quarterly net sales, and Olsavsky gave two reasons for it.
Why the number is small: Amazon is "not the importer of record for the large majority of items sold in our store, given suppliers typically handle imports and pay relevant tariffs," Olsavsky said. A refund follows the importer of record, so most of the duty money tied to goods sold on Amazon went back to the sellers who paid it.
The second reason is that Amazon bought ahead of the tariffs. "Our teams did a lot of work forward buying and pre-positioning inventory to avoid tariff costs," Olsavsky said. Inventory that cleared customs before the duties applied never generated a charge to refund.
What shoppers get: Amazon says it "largely absorbed" the tariff costs it did take rather than raise prices. Where it can trace a specific import charge to a specific order, it will pay that customer back. "We will proactively contact affected customers and automatically issue refunds," Olsavsky said, describing it as "a limited set of circumstances."
The rest of the quarter:
Net sales rose 20% to $200.6 billion, and operating income rose 43% to $27.5 billion.
Amazon raised its full-year capex plan to roughly $220 billion from $200 billion. Andy Jassy attributed most of the increase to the rising cost of memory chips.
Worldwide shipping costs rose 19% year over year, against 17% growth in paid units. Strip out higher fuel and line-haul rates, Olsavsky said, and shipping costs grew more slowly than unit volume.
Amazon expects to more than double its fleet of robotic arms this year.
