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Jassy enters spotlight as successor to Bezos

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SEATTLE — Most retailers probably didn’t know much about Andy Jassy before last month.

As chief executive officer of its web services division, Jassy was already running Amazon’s most profitable business. But now he steps fully into the spotlight, having been named to succeed Jeff Bezos as Amazon’s CEO.

The move will mark the end of an era at Amazon. Bezos has been Amazon’s CEO since its founding in 1995. He oversaw its growth from an online bookseller into a $1.7 trillion global retail and logistics giant, which has also made Bezos into one of the world’s richest people.

“I’m excited to announce that this Q3 I’ll transition to executive chair of the Amazon board and Andy Jassy will become CEO,” Bezos wrote in a letter to employees, according to CNBC. “In the exec chair role, I intend to focus my energies and attention on new products and early initiatives. Andy 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.”

Jassy joined Amazon in 1997, and in 2002 the young executive began shadowing Bezos, according to a recent profile in The New York Times. The aim of the exercise was for “Jassy to be ‘a brain double’ for Mr. Bezos so that he could challenge his boss’s thinking and anticipate his questions,” the article said.

In 2003 Jassy was involved in the project that later became Amazon Web Services, which he has run since its inception. The original idea was that Amazon could make a business out of helping other companies with their web businesses by leveraging the technologies and processes Amazon had developed in creating its own business.

Under Jassy AWS has become a critical component in Amazon’s success. AWS’ sales were $45.4 billion last year, accounting for 12% of the parent company’s revenue and 63% of its profits.

The announcement that Jassy would succeed Bezos as CEO came as part of Amazon’s fourth quarter earnings report. The company beat Wall Street analysts’ projections for both sales and profit, as the pandemic boosted both its retail and cloud businesses. (See story on page 17.)

In his letter to Amazon employees, Bezos said he would still be involved in running the company, but would be devoting more time to other pursuits, including his Blue Origin spaceship company, Bezos Earth Fund and The Washington Post.

“Amazon couldn’t be better positioned for the future,” he wrote. “We are firing on all cylinders, just as the world needs us to. We have things in the pipeline that will continue to astonish. We serve individuals and enterprises, and we’ve pioneered two complete industries and a whole new class of devices. We are leaders in areas as varied as machine learning and logistics, and if an Amazonian’s idea requires yet another new institutional skill, we’re flexible enough and patient enough to learn it.”


ECRM_06-01-22


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