Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos steps down, but won’t be stepping away

Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon’s cloud business, will replace Jeff Bezos when he transitions to the role of Executive Chair of the company in the third quarter of 2021. Pics/AP/AfP

Jeff Bezos, who founded Amazon as an online bookseller nearly three decades ago, will step down as the CEO of the USD 1.7 trillion global e-commerce giant and will become the executive chairman, a move he said would give him "time and energy" to focus on his other ventures and passions.

Take role of Executive Chair
Amazon, which announced on Wednesday that 2020 net sales increased 38 per cent to $386.1 billion, compared with $280.5 billion in 2019, said Bezos will transition to the role of Executive Chair in the third quarter of 2021 and Andy Jassy, CEO of the company's cloud business, Amazon Web Services, will become CEO at that time.

Even after stepping aside as CEO, Bezos appears likely to keep identifying new frontiers for the world's dominant e-commerce company. His successor, meanwhile, gets to deal with escalating efforts to curtail its power.

Tuesday's announcement that Bezos will hand off the CEO job this summer came as a surprise. But it doesn't mean Amazon is losing the visionary who turned an online bookstore founded in 1995 into a behemoth worth $1.7 trillion that sometimes seems to do a little bit of everything.

Bezos, 57, has never let Amazon rest on its laurels. In the last year alone, it bought a company developing self-driving taxis; launched an online pharmacy selling inhalers and insulin; and won government approval to put more than 3,200 satellites into space to beam internet service to Earth.

"Jeff Bezos has held a firm grip on the company for a long time, " said Ken Perkins, president of RetailMetrics LLC, a retail research firm. "I have to believe he will have a say in what is going on and have a big hand in big picture decisions."

Amazon's chief financial officer, Brian Olsavsky, made the move sound like a mere shuffling of chairs. "It's more of a restructuring of who's doing what," he said during a Tuesday call with reporters.

Investors staying
Investors didn't bail after hearing about Amazon's forthcoming change in command, and instead focused on the company's blockbuster earnings, which it also announced Tuesday. Amazon's stock edged up slightly in Tuesday's extended trading - not something that tends to happen when Wall Street is worried about a management shake-up. "I don't think he's going to be completely hands off," CFRA analyst Tuna Amobi said of Bezos.

Focus on innovations
In a blog post, Bezos said the CEO job had pulled him away from exploring new ideas and initiatives that could yield growth opportunities. He now intends to focus more on such innovation, along with other ventures such as his rocket ship company Blue Origin and his newspaper, The Washington Post.