Amazon’s air cargo head changes jobs, will now oversee workplace-safety unit

Published

2 years ago

May 25, 2023

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Sarah Rhoads, who was responsible for Amazon‘s burgeoning air cargo business, is shifting roles to oversee the e-retailer’s workplace health and safety division.

John Felton, Amazon’s head of worldwide operations, announced the move in a note to staffers on Thursday, according to a copy of the memo viewed by CNBC. Rhoads will also be in charge of Amazon’s global operations learning and development unit, which deals with things like career advancement and skills improvement in the company’s front-line workforce.

“Safety is paramount in every aspect of aerospace and other industries look to aviation for best practices in safety,” Felton wrote in the memo. “Sarah’s background as a decorated military pilot and her success leading Amazon Global Air positions her as the ideal leader to assume this critical role.”

Raoul Sreenivasan, who joined Amazon in 2016 and currently oversees planning, performance and cargo for Amazon Global Air, will take over most of Rhoads’ Amazon Air responsibilities, Felton said. Prior to joining Amazon, Sreenivasan worked at DHL and TNT Express, a European courier acquired by FedEx.

Rhoads, a former U.S. Navy F-18 pilot, has been one of the top executives in Amazon’s sprawling logistics business. She joined the e-commerce giant in 2011.

Over the past several years, Amazon has steadily moved more of its fulfillment and logistics operations in house, building a transportation network that the company says rivals UPS in size.

As part of an effort to handle and deliver more of its own packages, Amazon launched an air cargo business. Rhoads joined Amazon Air in its early days and has overseen much of the unit’s growth, including the opening of a $1.5 billion air hub in Kentucky.

Amazon has contracted more passenger airlines to fly packages in addition to other operators like Atlas Air and ATSG. Sun Country, a leisure-focused carrier, began flying converted Boeing 737 freighters for Amazon in 2020, after travel collapsed in the Covid pandemic. In October, Amazon announced that it reached an agreement with Hawaiian Airlines to fly leased Airbus A330 converted freighters, which would be the largest aircraft in Amazon’s fleet and its first Airbus jets. The planes will help replace older jets in the company’s fleet, Amazon said.

Air cargo rates have plunged from record highs hit during late 2021, when port snarls and a dearth of international flights pinched capacity and drove up prices. The rebound in air travel has added capacity to the market, while inflation has fueled shifts in consumer spending. FedEx last year said it would park some aircraft and reduce some of its flights as part of its plan to slash costs.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy is in the midst of a broad overview of the company’s expenses as the company reckons with an economic downturn and slowing growth in its core retail business. Amazon rapidly scaled up its fulfillment and transportation network in recent years in response to a pandemic-driven surge in demand. It’s since closed, canceled or delayed several warehouses across the U.S.

The company has also faced growing pressure to address its workplace-safety record. Employees criticized Amazon’s coronavirus response, arguing it wasn’t doing enough to protect them on the job, and the company has faced widespread scrutiny over the injury rates in its warehouses.

In September, Amazon appointed Becky Gansert to oversee its workplace health and safety unit after Heather MacDougall resigned from the company, CNBC previously reported.

Amazon has disputed reports of unsafe working conditions. During MacDougall’s tenure, the company set ambitious goals to reduce injuries, including a plan to cut recordable incident rates, a federal government measurement covering injury and illness, by half by 2025.

Last year Amazon committed to become “Earth’s Best Employer,” adding it to its list of corporate values, even as labor unrest intensified. The executive tasked with overseeing that effort, Pam Greer, departed Amazon last April, according to Bloomberg.

Correction: Sarah Rhoads joined Amazon in 2011. An earlier version misstated the year.

WATCH: Inside the rapid growth of Amazon Logistics and how it’s taking on third-party shipping

Technology

Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer says, as shareholder, tariffs are ‘not good’

Published

5 hours ago

April 4, 2025

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Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer says, as shareholder, tariffs are 'not good'

President Trump’s new tariffs on goods that the U.S. imports from over 100 countries will have an effect on consumers, former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer told CNBC on Friday. Investors will feel the pain, too.

Microsoft’s stock dropped almost 6% in the past two days, as the Nasdaq wrapped up its worst week in five years.

“As a Microsoft shareholder, this kind of thing is not good,” Ballmer said, in an interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin that was tied to Microsoft’s 50th anniversary celebration. “It creates opportunity to be a serious, long-term player.”

Ballmer was sandwiched in between Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and current CEO Satya Nadella for the interview.

“I took just enough economics in college — that tariffs are actually going to bring some turmoil,” said Ballmer, who was succeeded by Nadella in 2014. Gates, Microsoft’s first CEO, convinced Ballmer to join the company in 1980.

Gates, Ballmer and Nadella attended proceedings at Microsoft’s Redmond, Washington, campus on Friday to celebrate its first half-century.

Between the tariffs and weak quarterly revenue guidance announced in January, Microsoft’s stock is on track for its fifth straight month of declines, which would be the worst stretch since 2009. But the company remains a leader in the PC operating system and productivity software markets, and its partnership with startup OpenAI has led to gains in cloud computing.

“I think that disruption is very hard on people, and so the decision to do something for which disruption was inevitable, that needs a lot of popular support, and nobody could game theorize exactly who is going to do what in response,” Ballmer said, regarding the tariffs. “So, I think citizens really like stability a lot. And I hope people — individuals who will feel this, because people are feeling it, not just the stock market, people are going to feel it.”

Ballmer, who owns the Los Angeles Clippers, is among Microsoft’s biggest fans. He said he’s the company’s largest investor. In 2014, shortly after he bought the basketball team for $2 billion, he held over 333 million shares of the stock, according to a regulatory filing.

“I’m not going to probably have 50 more years on the planet,” he said. “But whatever minutes I have, I’m gonna be a large Microsoft shareholder.” He said there’s a bright future for computing, storage and intelligence. Microsoft launched the first Azure services while Ballmer was CEO.

Earlier this week Bloomberg reported that Microsoft, which pledged to spend $80 billion on AI-enabled data center infrastructure in the current fiscal year, has stopped discussions or pushed back the opening of facilities in the U.S. and abroad.

JPMorgan Chase’s chief economist, Bruce Kasman, said in a Thursday note that the chance of a global recession will be 60% if Trump’s tariffs kick in as described. His previous estimate was 40%.

“Fifty years from now, or 25 years from now, what is the one thing you can be guaranteed of, is the world needs more compute,” Nadella said. “So I want to keep those two thoughts and then take one step at a time, and then whatever are the geopolitical or economic shifts, we’ll adjust to it.”

Gates, who along with co-founder Paul Allen, sought to build a software company rather than sell both software and hardware, said he wasn’t sure what the economic effects of the tariffs will be. Today, most of Microsoft’s revenue comes from software. It also sells Surface PCs and Xbox consoles.

“So far, it’s just on goods, but you know, will it eventually be on services? Who knows?” said Gates, who reportedly donated around $50 million to a nonprofit that supported Democratic nominee Kamala Harris’ losing campaign.

— CNBC’s Alex Harring contributed to this report.

WATCH: There will be many LLM winners, says infrastructure investor Morrison

Technology

AppLovin can offer TikTok ‘much stronger bid than others,’ CEO says

Published

7 hours ago

April 4, 2025

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AppLovin can offer TikTok 'much stronger bid than others,' CEO says

Piotr Swat | Lightrocket | Getty Images

AppLovin CEO Adam Foroughi provided more clarity on the ad-tech company’s late-stage effort to acquire TikTok, calling his offer a “much stronger bid than others” on CNBC’s The Exchange Friday afternoon.

Foroughi said the company is proposing a merger between AppLovin and the entire global business of TikTok, characterizing the deal as a “partnership” where the Chinese could participate in the upside while AppLovin would run the app.

“If you pair our algorithm with the TikTok audience, the expansion on that platform for dollars spent will be through the roof,” Foroughi said.

The news comes as President Trump announced he would extend the deadline a second time for TikTok’s Chinese-owned parent company ByteDance to sell the U.S. subsidiary of TikTok to an American buyer or face an effective ban on U.S. app stores. The new deadline is now in June, which, as Foroughi described, “buys more time to put the pieces together” on AppLovin’s bid.

“The president’s a great dealmaker — we’re proposing, essentially an enhancement to the deal that they’ve been working on, but a bigger version of all the deals contemplated,” he added.

AppLovin faces a crowded field of other interested U.S. backers, including Amazon, Oracle, billionaire Frank McCourt and his Project Liberty consortium, and numerous private equity firms. Some proposals reportedly structure the deal to give a U.S. buyer 50% ownership of the company, rather than a complete acquisition. The Chinese government will still need to approve the deal, and AppLovin’s interest in purchasing TikTok in “all markets outside of China” is “preliminary,” according to an April 3 SEC filing.

Correction: A prior version of this story incorrectly characterized China’s ongoing role in TikTok should AppLovin acquire the app.

WATCH: AppLovin CEO Adam Foroughi on its bid to buy TikTok

Technology

Trump’s tariff rates for other countries radically larger than World Trade data

Published

8 hours ago

April 4, 2025

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Trump's tariff rates for other countries radically larger than World Trade data

U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during an event announcing new tariffs in the Rose Garden at the White House in Washington, April 2, 2025.

Chip Somodevilla | Getty Images

President Donald Trump announced an aggressive, far-reaching “reciprocal tariff” policy this week, leaving many economists and U.S. trade partners to question how the White House calculated its rates.

Trump’s plan established a 10% baseline tariff on almost every country, though many nations such as China, Vietnam and Taiwan are subject to much steeper rates. At a ceremony in the Rose Garden on Wednesday, Trump held up a poster board that outlined the tariffs that it claims are “charged” to the U.S., as well as the “discounted” reciprocal tariffs that America would implement in response.

Those reciprocal tariffs are mostly about half of what the Trump administration said each country has charged the U.S. The poster suggests China charges a tariff of 67%, for instance, and that the U.S. will implement a 34% reciprocal tariff in response.

However, a report from the Cato Institute suggests the trade-weighted average tariff rates in most countries are much different than the figures touted by the Trump administration. The report is based on trade-weighted average duty rates from the World Trade Organization in 2023, the most recent year available.

The Cato Institute says the 2023 trade-weighted average tariff rate from China was 3%. Similarly, the administration says the EU charges the U.S. a tariff of 39%, while the 2023 trade-weighted average tariff rate was 2.7%, according to the report.

In India, the Trump administration claims that a 52% tariff is charged against the U.S., but Cato found that the 2023 trade-weighted average tariff rate was 12%.

Many users on social media this week were quick to notice that the U.S. appeared to have divided the trade deficit by imports from a given country to arrive at tariff rates for individual countries. It’s an unusual approach, as it suggests that the U.S. factored in the trade deficit in goods but ignored trade in services.

The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative briefly explained its approach in a release, and stated that computing the combined effects of tariff, regulatory, tax and other policies in various countries “can be proxied by computing the tariff level consistent with driving bilateral trade deficits to zero.”

“If trade deficits are persistent because of tariff and non-tariff policies and fundamentals, then the tariff rate consistent with offsetting these policies and fundamentals is reciprocal and fair,” the USTR said in the release.