Amazon R&D spend outweighs Alphabet and Samsung

Amazon is the global front runner in the research and development space.

RIFT Research and Development looked at the total spend by companies on R&D as well as what percentage of revenue this accounted for. Amazon clocked in at £17.38 billion in a single year. “The development of delivery drones must be expensive although it’s money well spent, with Amazon’s evolution ensuring that its giant R&D spend equates to just 13% of revenue,” a press release notes.

Alphabet took second spot. The parent company of Google splashed out £12.47 billion in a year on R&D. Volkswagen took bronze with £12.12 billion. Samsung (£11.77 billion), Microsoft (£11.33 billion), Huawei (£10.45 billion), Intel (£10.07 billion) and Apple (£8.90 billion) ranked fourth to eight.

Director of RIFT Research and Development, Sarah Collins comments: “It goes without saying that some of the biggest names in the business will be spending considerable amounts of money on bettering their proposition through innovation, research, and development and those with the huge budgets to do so are also some with the lowest percentage of R&D spend as a percentage of revenue.”

She adds: “While R&D certainly lends itself to a wider array of work in certain sectors, such as automotive, pharmaceuticals, engineering and software development, it certainly isn’t restricted to these sectors alone and it’s great to see so many vast and varied businesses taking advantage of R&D tax relief in the UK in particular.”