Amazon will increase the rates to all Spanish companies, both large and small, that use its platform to market their products. The increase will be 3%, as El Confidencial has advanced and the multinational has confirmed to this newspaper. The rise will begin to apply from the month of April. This, after the entry into force on January 16 of the Tax on Certain Digital Services, popularly known as the ‘Google rate’, which taxes certain operations of the digital economy that until now were not taxed. Specifically, it establishes a rate of 3% for the income generated by online advertising services, online intermediation services and the sale of data obtained from information provided by the user. But the tribute is only applicable to companies with worldwide annual revenues of 750 million euros and that in Spain enter more than three million euros.
If the government’s intention was to tax the large technology conglomerates, Amazon is clear that it will avoid your payment by passing on the cost to its customers. And although the first payment of the tax will not take place until July – when the first two quarters of this year will be made jointly – according to the letter sent by the US conglomerate to its Spanish clients, the 3% increase will be will begin to apply from April 1. The company affirms that it will absorb the new tribute from January 16 to March 31.
In practice, as the company clarifies, This increase implies that if for making a sale of 100 euros, Amazon applies a sales commission of 15%, the 3% increase is applied to the rate, which will become 15.45%. For that specific operation that is proposed in the example, the client, from paying 15 euros, will pay 15.45.
The digital sector hides itself in that the way in which the tax is designed pushes it to act like this: it defends that profits should be taxed and not income. Furthermore, Amazon insists that this tax should not be applied nationally, but internationally: “Like many others, we have urged the government to seek a global solution on taxing the digital economy at the OECD level instead of imposing unilateral taxes. , so that the rules are consistent in all countries and clearer and fairer for companies ”.
It will be the customer companies of Amazon.com who will decide to what extent the increase in commissions charged by the technological platform will be passed on to final customers.
The Spanish Government also defends that the tax be agreed on a global level. And it has promised that, when this tax figure is designed in the OECD, Spain will adapt the tax to the new international scheme. Amazon does not clarify to this newspaper what it will do with the increase in rates that it has decided now in the event that there is a solution agreed worldwide on technology tax.
According to the latest OECD statements, the agreement on the digital tax will not arrive until the middle of this year. The organization coordinates the negotiation between 137 countries on the tax regulations that must govern internationally.
The rate increase will be applicable to sales made through Amazon.com. But Spain is not the only country affected by the US giant’s rate hike. It has also taken the same measure in France, Italy and the United Kingdom, where there are similar taxes to the domestic.
Amazon, at the request of this newspaper, does not clarify how many customers it has in our country, that is, how many companies will be affected by the increase in its rates. Nor does it reveal how much income or benefits you obtain in Spain or the volume of taxes that you have been paying in our country so far.
The International Monetary Fund has encouraged Spain in recent months to raise taxes on the sectors least affected by the crisis caused by the coronavirus.
Globally, Amazon achieved a net profit of 14,109 million dollars between January and September 2020, which represents an increase of 69% compared to the same period of the previous year. And the improvement is attributed to the exceptional context caused by the pandemic, which has pushed activities such as electronic commerce, given the limitations that face-to-face businesses have suffered. Its sales in the same period stood at 260,509 million dollars, 35% above those of a year earlier.
Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, is the second largest fortune on the planet (Elon Musk, the creator of Tesla, has just surpassed him. If Bezos ended 2019 with a net worth of 94.4 billion euros, in 2020, in the midst of a pandemic, he made him fat in another 58,500 million.
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