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April 18 (UPI) -- Amazon has exceeded 100 million paid Prime subscribers, CEO Jeff Bezos said in a letter to shareholders Wednesday. In the annual letter to shareholders Bezos said more new members joined Prime in 2017 than any previous year, both in the United States and worldwide after expanding to Mexico, Singapore, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg.
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The letter marks the first time Amazon has publicly released the number of subscribers to the paid service, which provides expedited shipping as well as a variety of digital features such as video and music streaming and cloud photo storage.
In another first, the company revealed the median annual pay for Amazon workers other than Bezos was $28,446 for 2017, according to Bloomberg.
The data was listed in Amazon's annual proxy statement filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, which also featured pay for top executives including Bezos who received $1.68 million in compensation for 2017. The figure included $81,840 in salary and $1.6 million for the cost of "security arrangements."
Bezos noted more than 5 billion items were shipped worldwide using Amazon Prime in 2017, which was first announced in January.
Amazon also experienced record hardware sales in 2017 as Bezos said the company sold "tens of millions" of Echo devices including the Echo Dot and Fire TV Stick, which were the best-selling products throughout the online retailer.
Bezos added Amazon has begun the technical work for Prime members to receive benefits at Whole Foods stores, after the company acquired the grocery chain for $13.7 billion in 2017.
The rest of Bezos' letter focused on Amazon's efforts to live up to the rising expectations of its customers by maintaining high standards.
"How do you stay ahead of ever-rising customer expectations? There's no single way to do it -- it's a combination of many things. But high standards (widely deployed and at all levels of detail) are certainly a big part of it," Bezos wrote.
