By
Chimamanda U. Martha
March 11th, 2024
The Chief Financial Officer of Amazon Brian Olsavsky disclosed that the move was decided in consultation with the Board of Directors of Amazon. Andy Jassy will become a new CEO.
Jeff Bezos, 57, the founder and CEO of Amazon.com Inc (NASDAQ: AMZN), has revealed his intention to step down as the company’s CEO in the third quarter of the calendar year. According to an email to the employees, Bezos will not step aside from the company entirely but will transition to the executive chairman of the Amazon board.
Unlike most of the mega-companies out there, the succession plan of Amazon.com, Inc. has been well protected from the public domain, giving rooms for speculations as a portion of the public firmly believed that the next CEO would either be Jeff Wilke, CEO of Amazon’s Worldwide Consumer Business or Andy Jassy, Amazon’s top cloud executive who joined the company in 1997. These speculations had a lot of accuracies as Jassy has been said to be taking over from Bezos.
Bezos founded the company in 1994 with the primary focus on online bookstores. As time went by, the company metamorphosed into a solid online retail business offering a wide range of categories including streaming and gadgets. Bezos’ leadership influence on the company took its market cap to a current value of $1.6 trillion.
The Chief Financial Officer of Amazon Brian Olsavsky in an interview disclosed that the move was decided in consultation with the Board of Directors of Amazon.com Inc. He further stated that Bezos will still be involved in some important role in the company. Also, the current transition will see continuity in the future.
Bezos in a statement said that his role comes with a lot of responsibilities as millions of consumers depend on them, and millions of employees rely on them for their livelihood. This makes it difficult to focus on anything else. He will now have ample time to focus on the Bezos Earth Fund and the Amazon Day 1 Fund.
“In the Exec Chair role, I intend to focus my energies and attention on new products and early initiatives. Another way dy is well known inside the company and has been at Amazon almost as long as I have. He will be an outstanding leader, and he has my full confidence, ” he said.
Jassy has a huge hurdle to jump as he will have to take charge in taking the company through the antitrust concern. Amazon, Facebook Inc (NASDAQ: FB), Alphabet Inc (NASDAQ: GOOGL), and other companies have been under constant investigation of abusing their monopolistic power. In addition to this, a member of the House Judiciary Committee Rep. Ken Buck, R-Colo., posted that he has a question for Jassy, which implies that his journey would not be an easy one. Jassy was not chosen by default, but by his huge contribution to the Amazon Web Service Cloud team (AWS).
Through his guidance, AWS recorded a 28% revenue growth for the fourth quarter as revealed in the first $100 billion quarter. As of October 2020, 52% of the operating income of Amazon.com, Inc. was credited to AWS. Jassy is a visionary leader with his skillset and capability enough to drive the company to a new height.