Revealed: Amazon Prime has 100m global subscribers, Australian launch “coming” but no definite date

E-tail commerce giant Amazon has revealed for the first time that its Prime service has 100 million global subscribers.

They get benefits as free fast shipping, of 100 million items, streaming of movies, TV shows and music, exclusive shopping deals and unlimited reading.

Alas it doesn’t say how many music streamers it has.

Last year Prime delivered 5 billion packages, according to CEO Jeff Bezos in an annual newsletter to shareholders.

As analysts were working out that this would mean subscribers were paying $2 a package and wondering how it was possibly turning a profit, Bezos was dropping some bad news.

Citing rising costs, he revealed that membership fees were going up by 20%.

From May 11, new subscribers will pay $119 a year. Current ones will stick to the old fee until mid-year when their current policies come up for renewal.

This is not going to upset its 90 million American subscribers in the least.

For starters, MBLM’s 2018 Brand Intimacy study found that Amazon ranks second behind Apple as most “intimate” (or loved) brand while Amazon Prime ranked at #25 – above Apple Music, HBO and eBay.

Other studies have shown that 70% of Americans with incomes of $150,000 or more who shop online have Amazon Prime memberships.

They invariably buy an item at least once a week.

The membership price has stayed the same since 2014.

Subscribers would understand that Amazon has worked hard to make their subscriptions worthwhile.

It spent $4.5 billion on acquiring original content in 2017.

Last November, it beat out Netflix paying out $250 million for the rights to a five season Lord of the Rings television series.

By the time production begins by 2020, casting, producers and visual effects will push costs over $1 billion.

Amazon Prime international customers will grow at a 56% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) between 2016 and 2018.

By 2022 there will be 56 million Amazon Prime Video subscribers in the US, and 122 million worldwide.

The question is, when will Australia get Amazon Prime?

Amazon Prime Video launched in December 2016, Amazon in December 2017, and Amazon Music and Amazon Echo arrived in February.

The answer is soon, but probably not soon enough.

Especially for the impatient Australian customer who offered to donate her kidney to have the service introduced here.

At the Amazon Innovation Day in Sydney before a crowd of 10,000, the company’s SVP international consumer Russell Grandinetti said, “We are going to launch Prime.

“I don’t have any news to report about it other than we are working hard on it, it will come soon and I can also say it won’t cost you a kidney.”