Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Andrew Jassy: On the first one on grocery, I’d just start by saying that we think grocery is a really important and strategic area for us. It’s a very large market segment, and there’s a lot of frequency in how consumers shop for grocery. And we also believe that over time, grocery is going to be omnichannel. There are going to be a lot of people that order their grocery items online and have it delivered to them, and there are going to be a lot of people who continue to buy in physical stores. But you’re going to also see a hybrid of those, where people pick out what they want online and pick it up in stores, or people are in stores and there’s something that’s not in inventory in the stores, so they go to their app or to a kiosk and order it to be delivered from online.

And so I think having omnichannel is going to really matter. And I think that we have a pretty significant-sized grocery business. I think people sometimes don’t realize that and that we’ve been building for a long time. It’s continuing to accelerate, and I kind of see it broken into a few pieces. If you think about the online grocery offering, we have a very large business there. It looks different from the typical mega physical grocery store. But if you think about the aisles in a grocery store, from packaged food to paper products to canned goods to pet supplies to health and personal care items to consumables, we have a very large business there that continues to grow at a rapid clip and then we think will continue to grow. But it doesn’t have a big market segment share in perishables.

And if you really want to have significant market segment share in perishables, you typically need physical stores. And we have kind of 2 different offerings there. For what I think is the very best organic physical store experience and selection, we have Whole Foods, which is a very significant-sized business that’s continuing to grow. I really like the progress that, that business has made on profitability in the last year. And I like what I see in front of it, and I think that’s a very — it’s a premium product, but it’s a significant business. It’s a good business for us in the grocery space. I think if you want to have a mass physical store offering, you need a different offering. And that’s what we’ve been working on with Amazon Fresh, and we have a few dozen stores so far.

We’re doing a fair bit of experimentation today in those stores to try to find a format that we think resonates with customers. It’s differentiated in some meaningful fashion and where we like the economics. And we’ve been — we’ve decided over the last year or so that we’re not going to expand the physical Fresh doors until we have that equation with differentiation and economic value that we like, but we’re optimistic that we’re going to find that in 2023. We’re working hard at it. We see some encouraging signs. And when we do find that equation, we will expand it more expansively. But I think that we have a very significant opportunity in the grocery segment. I think we’re building a pretty broad grocery network across online and physical, and you’re going to see us continue to work on it.

Operator: And our next question comes from the line of Eric Sheridan with Goldman Sachs.