American E-commerce firm, Amazon.com, Inc., has recently announced that Iranian government officials purchased $120,000 worth of goods from its website. Some of these transactions are illegal, as US regulators deem some Iranian officials to be involved in the “proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and terrorism.”
Amazon.com, Inc. has said that it will prevent the accounts that made those purchases from buying more goods from the Amazon site. Amazon has grown exponentially as the online shopping industry has expanded, and they are now one of the largest online retailers in the world. They have been placing pressure on conventional retailers, such as Wal-Mart.
According to an official Amazon filling, the purchased products includes music, books, software and apparel. An article published on Business Insider on the 29/07/2016 gave more details. It reads “Approximately $96,000 worth of products were sold to Iranian government officials located outside the country, while another $1,600 worth of purchases were made by two entities considered to be owned or controlled by the Iranian government. Roughly $23,000 worth of consumer products were sold to accounts designated under Executive Order 13382 or Executive Order 13224 and owned or controlled by the Iranian government.”
Amazon is a well-diversified company, active in a vast number of sectors, ranging from fashion, to cloud computing. The firm has been performing well, vastly increasing its profitability over the past year or so. This has caused its share price to increase, making its CEO, Jeff Bezos, who owns 18% of the company’s stock, the 3rd richest man in the world.
Bezos also owns a few media outlets, such as Business Insider, and he also owns his own space exploration company which is trying to make space travel commonplace by slashing costs.
As the NASDAQ closed on the 29/07/2016, Amazon.com, Inc.’s stock was up by 0.82%, valued at $758.81 per share. The corporation’s market capitalization is $365.77 billion.
