Jeff Bezos steps down as Amazon CEO
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Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is leaving his position as CEO of the e-commerce giant. A successor has already been determined in Andy Jassy.
The world’s largest online retailer, Amazon, is introducing a change at its top. Company founder Jeff Bezos will hand over the chairmanship to Andy Jassy, the head of the booming cloud business, in the third quarter of 2021. Amazon announced on Tuesday after the US market closed in Seattle. At the same time, the company presented figures for the fourth quarter and the past fiscal year that far exceeded market expectations.
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Amazon: Bezos retains influence on corporate fortunes
As executive chairman of the board of directors, Bezos is likely to continue to exert great influence on the group even after his resignation. The 57-year-old top manager founded Amazon in 1994 and built the company from an online bookstore into a billion-dollar group. With an estimated fortune of 188 billion dollars (155.4 billion euros), Bezos is currently the second richest person in the world according to the “Bloomberg Billionaires Index”.
In a memo To the Amazon employees, Bezos explained that his decision was not about retiring. “I’ve never had more energy,” emphasized the CEO. In his future role as Chairman of the Board of Directors, Bezos wants to focus his energy and attention on new products and initiatives. He also gains more time for other projects such as his foundations, his space company Blue Origin or the newspaper “The Washington Post”, which is privately owned.
AWS boss Andy Jassy becomes new Amazon CEO
In the three months to the end of December, Amazon cracked the $ 100 billion mark for the first time thanks to the order boom in the Corona crisis and a strong Christmas business. Compared to the same period last year, revenues increased 44 percent to $ 125.6 billion. Amazon was able to more than double its net profit to 7.2 billion dollars (six billion euros). In fiscal 2020, the group earned $ 21.3 billion, an 84 percent increase and a new record.
The online giant once again benefited greatly from its cloud business with IT services and storage space on the Internet. The AWS platform, which is run by the future CEO Jassy and is used by many companies and apps, increased its quarterly sales by 28 percent, 12.7 billion dollars, and thus remained somewhat below expectations. Meanwhile, operating profit climbed 37 percent to $ 3.6 billion, which clearly shows what an attractive profit maker Amazon’s cloud flagship continues to be. dpa
