Founder of Amazon.com Inc., Jeff Bezos will be stepping down from his position as CEO of the company to become the executive chairman. His successor will be the head of the company’s lucrative cloud computing division, which highlights the company’s transformation from an ecommerce retailer to an internet conglomerate. The 57 year-old founder will handing the keys of the largest online retailer in the world this summer to Andy Jassy, who is currently the head of Amazon Web Services, which is known as AWS. The announcement was made on Tuesday and it settles the question of who would replace the second-richest person in the world at the company’s helm.
Bezos will be ending his role as chief executive of the company on a high note; the business he had started 27 years ago as an internet bookseller has now become one of the most valuable companies in the world and posted record profits for three consecutive periods after losses in the decades before. On Tuesday, for the first time the company also reported quarterly sales of more than $100 billion. 53-year old Jassy had joined Amazon in 1997 after Harvard Business School. According to the company’s website, he had founded AWS and had grown it into a cloud platform that’s used by millions of people today.
He was a clear contender for the top role since two CEO roles had been created years ago by Amazon for reporting to Bezos. The other had been held by Jeff Wilke, the consumer CEO who recently retired. Global marketing firm Mindshare’s chief transformation officer, Tom Johnson said that Jassy’s promotion highlighted the importance of the web hosting business in Amazon’s strategy. He said that Jassy’s background in managing AWS indicates just how crucial these services are to the company’s business strategy. He went on to say that it would be interesting to see how the company would balance this priority with the commerce behemoth and growing ad business.
Jassy has a reputation of understanding the highly technical details and has also taken some jabs at cloud rival Microsoft Corp and legacy player Oracle Corp. Bezos hasn’t made that many public remarks about his competitors. Under his leadership, the cloud business at Amazon has signed some major clients, such as McDonald’s, Verizon and Honeywell. The startups in Silicon Valley have long relied on Amazon’s services and the annual revenue of the division grew by 37% and 30% in 2019 and 2020, respectively, thereby helping in cementing its position as the market leader.
However, there was one contract that AWS did not win from the Pentagon and this was worth $10 billion for the ‘JEDI’ project that was awarded to Microsoft. Jassy has attempted to add a rock-star aura to the keynotes at the annual Las Vegas conference of AWS. He talked before 60,000 attendees after upbeat music in 2019. Bezos said that it wasn’t about his retiring because he still had a lot of energy and he would maintain an active role as the executive chairman of the company.
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