Speculation among Amazon-watchers has been growing over the Prime question: When will the company hold its annual Prime Day sales? Bloomberg Technology reported that the event will take place on June 21 and 22, based on company records and a source familiar with the matter.
Amazon notified employees about the dates and asked them to keep the information confidential until an official announcement, Bloomberg said. The world’s biggest online retailer didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Historically, Prime Day has been held in July to coincide with Amazon’s original launch date. Last year, the company rescheduled Prime Day for October as the pandemic swept the country. The company is holding off on Prime Day in Canada and India due to COVID-19 concerns.
Prime Day has been a major revenue-maker for Amazon. The company relies on the annual event to beef up sales and to attract and retain subscribers to Amazon Prime, its paid subscription service. The event can deliver as much as a 10-times boost to average daily sales, accounting for as much as 2 percent of annual revenue.
The retailer’s first Prime Day was in 2015, and it has since grown into a two-day sales extravaganza. Competitors often offer their own deals in parallel with Amazon’s event.
As a means of boosting subscriptions, access to Prime Video is included for free with an Amazon Prime annual subscription. The company’s financial commitment to Prime Video continues to reverberate, as Amazon has poured cash into original films while pursuing mega-dollar content deals such as its $1 billion bid to carry NFL Thursday Night Football games.
On Wednesday (May 26), Amazon struck a deal to buy movie giant MGM for $8.45 billion. “The real financial value behind this deal is the treasure trove” of 4,000 films that is MGM’s catalog of movies, said Mike Hopkins, senior vice president of Prime Video and Amazon Studios.
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