Good morning from the Financial Times.

Today is Friday, May 1st,

and this is your FT news briefing.

Amazon warns that the cost of keeping workers healthy

and moving products could wipe out any gain from a jump in sales.

And Boeing has tapped the bond market to deal with a coronavirus cash drain.

Plus the F.T.'s Judith Evans explains why Britain is experiencing a shortage of fruit pickers.

I'm Mark Filipino and here's the news you need to start your day. Yesterday, Amazon reported a record 75 and a half billion dollars in net sales for the first quarter of 2020, higher than what Wall Street expected. But even though Amazon

expects record revenues again in the second quarter, the company is

warning that those gains will come with a big asterisk. The F.T's Dave Lee has more.

Well Amazon obviously was expecting this huge jump in sales but the problem is that in

order to keep things moving you know whether it's keeping the workers healthy and at work and also getting those

products out to consumers in such high numbers the costs associated that have

been incredibly high so in the first quarter which you know only really started to feel the

impact of coronavirus towards the end of the quarter. Amazon said that it spent

six hundred million dollars on COVID related expenses so you know extra staffing and other issues like that.

But they predict that in the second quarter where obviously the pandemic has really taken

hold, they're saying that those costs could go up to as much as 4 billion dollars which is

obviously a staggering amount and enough more than enough to offset any revenue

gains that they're going to have and indeed they expect to have big revenue gains as they have had in the

first quarter but it's just not going to be enough to cover the costs associated with doing

business in the middle of a global pandemic.

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