(Corrects to add dropped word "store" in headline and paragraph 1)

By Supantha Mukherjee

STOCKHOLM (Reuters) -Amazon has more than 181 million users in the European Union and directly employs more than 150,000 people in the region, the company said on Wednesday, in its first store transparency report as required by the EU Digital Services Act (DSA).

In August, the Digital Services Act (DSA) imposed new rules on content moderation, user privacy and transparency for platforms and search engines labelled as very large online platforms (VLOP), which were defined as having more than 45 million users in the EU.

Amazon has challenged its inclusion in the group, saying it was not the largest retailer in any of the EU countries in which it operates.

Germany is by far the biggest market for Amazon store with more than 60 million monthly active users, followed by France with 35 million users, according to the report.

The company has corporate offices across 50 European cities and 250 logistics centres in the block.

In the first half of 2023, the company said it took 274 million actions on its own initiative to remove content that violates policy, or other types of non-illegal content.

Amazon also received 8,863 legal requests from EU governments for information about users of its service in the first half of 2023.

(Reporting by Supantha Mukherjee; Editing by Sharon Singleton)