Amazon signals new willingness to listen to investors

San Francisco

AFTER years of giving investors the cold shoulder, Amazon.com Inc is starting to warm up to Wall Street. The No 1 US online retailer was unusually forthcoming during its fourth-quarter earnings call on Thursday, saying it will break out results this year, for the first time, for its fast-growing cloud computing unit, Amazon Web Services (AWS).

The company also said it would focus on getting more out of its assets in 2015 and emphasised that it was already starting to reap benefits from investments in steaming video and logistics infrastructure. "The team ... is putting even more energy around making sure we get great productivity around our various fixed and variable investments," chief financial officer Tom Szkutak said. This was a shift in tone for Amazon, which typically refuses to disclose more than th…