Jeff Bezos Stepping Down as Amazon CEO Today: End of Era

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Jeff Bezos, the iconic founder and long-term Chief Executive Officer of e-commerce giant, Amazon.com Inc (NASDAQ: AMZN), is stepping down from the company’s role. Bezos, who has been at the helm of affairs in the $1.77 trillion company since July 5, 1994, has grown the firm to dominate several industries today.

With his exit from the role, Jeff Bezos will be handing over Amazon to Andy Jassy, a 24-year staff of the firm renowned for building and running Amazon Web Services (AWS), the company’s dominant cloud-computing business. On his part, Bezos will assume the role of Executive Chairman for the firm.

Jeff Bezos Legacy in Amazon

The company started as a bookstore with a difference. The outfit in its early days sought to leverage the growing dot com bubble to sell books to consumers, a venture that swiftly expanded to other products including electronics, software, video games, apparel, furniture, food, toys, and jewelry.

The Amazon Jeff Bezos has built over the years dominates four key industries including e-commerce, streaming, logistics, and advertising. Under how he rebranded his online bookstore into an outfit where almost any item can be bought, Jeff Bezos has often been tagged as the father of e-commerce.

Jeff Bezos adopted the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and many cutting edges tools in today’s evolved digital economy to bring out the best in Amazon, all to the benefit of consumers.

“He led retail down this path by investing everything into the infrastructure to drive this future state when others effectively ignored this channel or gave up on it after the dot-com bubble of 2000,” said Bruce Winder, author of the book Retail Before, During & After Covid-19. “His use of analytics and AI transformed retail from a ‘gut feel’ industry to one that is driven by management science.”

The retail division of the Amazon empire received a massive boost during the harshest months of the COVID-19 pandemic. This helped triple profit back in the third quarter of 2020. Other ventures including Amazon Web Services, Logistics, and Ads unit have equally contributed to the firm’s overall growth in the preceding years.

Fitting the Big Shoe: Andy Jassy in the Picture

Andy was the man who built AWS and has been running it to date. The business unit is large enough and competes with other key players in the space. Now taking over as the firm’s boss, Andy will have to continue in Bezos’s legacy of incremental growth, both in revenue generation, staff addition, and share growth amongst others.

While executive changes and succession have a mixed impact on tech firms based on history, the new CEO will be particularly tasked with redirecting the growth path of Amazon stock which has maintained a relatively slow growth thus far. In the year-to-date period, the stock has grown by 6% when compared to the S&P 500 (INDEXSP: .INX) with a YTD growth of 15%.

Amazon has been a success story from its inception, despite several regulatory and antitrust concerns. While Jeff Bezos helped pilot the company to the unicorn it is today, Andy Jassy has also been instrumental to the overall success. With expectations of sustained performance all around, Wall Street will be keen to see how the new Amazon era.

Benjamin Godfrey is a blockchain enthusiast and journalists who relish writing about the real life applications of blockchain technology and innovations to drive general acceptance and worldwide integration of the emerging technology. His desires to educate people about cryptocurrencies inspires his contributions to renowned blockchain based media and sites. Benjamin Godfrey is a lover of sports and agriculture.