Prime business success

Betty Henderson

GLOBAL giant, Amazon registered record profits in Spain once again in 2022. The multinational retail corporation reported a whopping €6.4 billion in sales for 2022 in figures released on Friday, April 21.

The figures represent an income increase of almost 7 per cent compared with last year. Amazon’s earnings include revenues from its physical marketplaces operating in Spain, as well other branches of the busi‐ness including Amazon Web Services.

The company credits its Spanish success to investments totalling €3.7 billion in the country, which includes the opening of two new logistics centres in Zaragoza and

Girona. With 22,000 employees and over 40 facilities throughout Spain, Amazon is among the top 10 employers in the coun‐try.

However, the company isn’t without its critics, particularly as it announced some 9,000 layoffs globally, earlier this year which caused concern. Amazon later clarified that the layoffs are not exclusive to Spain, saying that it actually plans to expand its work‐force to 25,000 employees in the country by 2025.

Despite its immense success, Amazon said that its profit margins remain low due to the competitive market and increasing operating costs.

AS well as low rainfall, Span‐ish farmers are also strug‐gling to protect crops from a ‘plague’ of rabbits starved of fresh grass. As well as deal‐ing with the exceptionally dry winter, farmers in Cat‐alonia are facing a second problem, a plague of rab‐bits, who, starved of water, are beginning to destroy crops, especially wheat and barley, and eat the bark on vines and fruit trees.

Local Alex Foix said: “A lot of factors have con ‐tributed to the rabbit popu‐lation explosion: there was the pandemic when no one could hunt for two years; they’ve become immune to myxomatosis; and the female can produce seven or eight offspring every two months.”

The local government has estimated that more than 250,000 rabbits need to be killed by September to con‐tain the population.

To aid in the effort to re‐duce the numbers, the gov‐ernment has permitted the use of aluminium phos‐phate, which releases toxic phosphine gas when intro‐duced into burrows.