Daily Archives: April 21, 2022

Amazon (AMZN) Europe Unit Pays No Taxes on $55 Billion Sales in 2021

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Amazon.com Inc.’s main European retail business reported 1.16 billion euros ($1.26 billion) of losses in 2021, which allowed the company to pay no income tax and receive 1 billion euros in tax credits, corporate filings seen by Bloomberg show.

The Luxembourg-based business recorded sales of 51.3 billion euros last year, up 17% from 43.8 billion euros in 2020. The unit, called Amazon EU Sarl, includes revenue generated by its e-commerce activities in the U.K, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Poland, Sweden and the Netherlands.

Amazon has been a target of European regulators over its tax arrangements. The Seattle-based company won an appeal on a 250 million-euro ($280 million) tax bill imposed after regulators said agreements with Luxembourg dating back to 2003 amounted to illegal state aid. Last year, the European Commission appealed in the European Court of Justice.

An Amazon spokesperson said the company is subject to taxes in all its European branches, and that revenues, profits and taxes are recorded and reported directly to local tax authorities in those countries.

The filings provide a rare regional breakdown into Amazon’s finances. Over 2021 the group posted in global income of $33.36 billion, up from $21.3 billion the year previous. However the company does not break out income and sales from e-commerce in every country in its financial reports.

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Source: Amazon (AMZN) Europe Unit Pays No Taxes on $55 Billion Sales in 2021 – Bloomberg

Insteon is down and may not be coming back – yay cloud, your hardware is now a paperweight

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Is your Insteon smart home system down? I’m getting reports from dozens of Insteon users that as of Friday their smart home hubs have stopped working. So far, none of them have heard from the company, and Insteon’s Twitter account hasn’t been updated since June 2021. I reached out to Rob Lilleness, the president and chairman of Smartlabs, the company that owns Insteon and have not yet heard back.

However, Lilleness no longer lists Smartlabs/Smarthome/Insteon anywhere on his LinkedIn profile and other members of the Insteon management team have also appeared to decamp Smartlabs based on their LinkedIn profiles. Mike Nunes, the former CIO at Smartlabs lists his role at Insteon/Smartlabs ending in April 2022. Dan Cregg, the chief research officer lists his role at Smartlabs as ending in 2022. Matt Kowalec the president and COO lists his role at Smartlabs as ending in 2020;  and Tom Carter, the CIO doesn’t list his role in the company at all.

Image courtesy of Insteon.

Smartlabs is a combination of smart home brands that include Insteon and  Nokia Smart Lighting, which Smartlabs purchased last year. It also owns the smarthome.com web site where consumers can buy Insteon gear. An email to Smartlabs’ corporate office in Irvine, Calif. has not been returned and a call to the listen phone number returns a message saying Verizon could not complete the call and asking me to check the number before trying again. Multiple tries return the same message each time.

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With the current outage, Insteon’s app doesn’t work which means users will be hard pressed to change their device settings and add new gear. I’m hopeful to see if the folks over at Home Assistant or Hubitat can perhaps help stranded Insteon users transfer over to their platforms. It might be possible.

Further reading: With Insteon down, possibly for good, what options do you have for your devices?

Source: Insteon is down and may not be coming back – Stacey on IoT | Internet of Things news and analysis