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

Jeff Bezos who founded Amazon as an online bookseller nearly three decades ago will step down as the CEO of the USD 17 trillion global ecommerce giant and will become the executive chairman a move he said would give him ldquotime and energyrdquo to focus on his other ventures and passionsTake role of Executive ChairAmazon which announced on Wednesday that 2020 net sales increased 38 per cent to 3861 billion compared with 2805 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 companyrsquos cloud business Amazon Web Services will become CEO at that timeEven after stepping aside as CEO Bezos appears likely to keep identifying new frontiers for the worldrsquos dominant ecommerce company His successor meanwhile gets to deal with escalating efforts to curtail its powerTuesdayrsquos announcement that Bezos will hand off the CEO job this summer came as a surprise But it doesnrsquot mean Amazon is losing the visionary who turned an online bookstore founded in 1995 into a behemoth worth 17 trillion that sometimes seems to do a little bit of everythingBezos 57 has never let Amazon rest on its laurels In the last year alone it bought a company developing selfdriving taxis launched an online pharmacy selling inhalers and insulin and won government approval to put more than 3200 satellites into space to beam internet service to EarthldquoJeff Bezos has held a firm grip on the company for a long time rdquo said Ken Perkins president of RetailMetrics LLC a retail research firm ldquoI have to believe he will have a say in what is going on and have a big hand in big picture decisionsrdquoAmazonrsquos chief financial officer Brian Olsavsky made the move sound like a mere shuffling of chairs ldquoItrsquos more of a restructuring of whorsquos doing whatrdquo he said during a Tuesday call with reportersInvestors stayingInvestors didnrsquot bail after hearing about Amazonrsquos forthcoming change in command and instead focused on the companyrsquos blockbuster earnings which it also announced Tuesday Amazonrsquos stock edged up slightly in Tuesdayrsquos extended trading not something that tends to happen when Wall Street is worried about a management shakeup ldquoI donrsquot think hersquos going to be completely hands offrdquo CFRA analyst Tuna Amobi said of BezosFocus on innovationsIn 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