AMZN Amazon.com Inc

By Austen Hufford 

More than 100 million people globally are now paying for Amazon Prime, a sign of how Amazon.com Inc. has used the service to evolve from an online marketplace that struggled with profitability into an e-commerce powerhouse.

Amazon, which has never disclosed the number of Prime members before, revealed the figure Wednesday in Chief Executive Jeff Bezos's closely followed annual letter to shareholders.

Amazon's story to investors has largely been one of scale. In the company's view, having a large numbers of customers and clients has allowed it to spread costs broadly and continue investing in technology.

This view is shown in its growing Prime membership, through its massive cloud-server business and through how it lets third-party sellers onto its platform to compete against itself for customers. Amazon said Wednesday that a majority of goods shipped world-wide on its platform are now from these sellers.

Prime, which typically costs $99 a year, gives customers reduced shipping fees and access to free music and videos.

Amazon separately said that Mr. Bezos was paid $1.7 million in 2017, about 59 times higher than the median pay for an Amazon employee. The company disclosed the pay ratio in a securities filing as part of a broader requirement of the postcrisis Dodd-Frank law that went into effect this year.

Amazon's median salary of $28,446 is significantly less than some of its technology peers as the company increasingly hires warehouse workers to grow its intensive logistics operation. Those workers are typically paid less than high-skilled technology workers who are commonplace at the company's Seattle headquarters.

The median pay last year for employees of Facebook Inc. topped $240,000 and was over $160,000 at Twitter Inc., the companies said in recent securities filings. Companies were given some discretion to calculate the median figure, and many have excluded contract workers or people working outside the U.S., for example.

Write to Austen Hufford at austen.hufford@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

April 18, 2018 18:53 ET (22:53 GMT)

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