The man who from a small online library became the richest in the world. It is the Jeff Bezos, its founder Amazon, one of the strongest and most talked about companies in the world.
But the time has come for Jeff Bezos to hand over the Amazon keys. And he will do it today, July 5, 2021.
At 57, Jeff Bezos will step down as Amazon CEO and hand over to his vice president, Andy Jassi.
Jeff Bezos is leaving Amazon because he wants to dedicate himself to other projects, starting with a space trip on July 20th. He will retain an important role in the company, which he founded just 27 years ago, remaining executive chairman of its board.
Although he was hailed for his numerous innovations, which in some cases shook entire sectors of the economy, he was also maligned for certain business practices that stifled competition or for the treatment he accorded to his employees.
Whether it’s book sales, intangible information technology or home deliveries, “Bezos is a leader who encourages change,” says Darrell West of the Brookings Institution’s Center for Technology Innovation.
“It gave impetus to numerous services that people now take for granted, such as shopping online, ordering something and having it delivered to you the next day,” he notes.
Amazon, created in the garage of Jeff Bezos, who packaged the parcels himself, is now worth more than $ 1.7 trillion on the stock exchange and in 2020 had a turnover of $ 386 billion. It is a complex group, whose activities range from e-commerce to intangible information technology, ranging from groceries, artificial intelligence and film production.
Jeff Bezos and his instinct
Bezos “has the instinct to find what works” in the next market, says Roger Kay, an analyst at Endpoint Technologies Associates.
The company displaced its competitors by choosing in the first years “to reinvest all profits in growth”, Kay reminds. A strategy that sometimes made investors wonder, but now “seems perfectly reasonable,” he said.
For Tecnalysis Research’s Bob O’Donnell, Jeff Bezos was “neither the first nor the only one” in the field of e-commerce, “but he was able to understand it and work to improve it.”
The head of Amazon mainly “realized the need to build infrastructure”, whether it is his wide network of warehouses or his fleet of trucks, observes O’Donnell. “Numerous other companies were reluctant to spend money on this thankless job behind the scenes.”
The fortune of his business made his own: even after giving his ex-wife a share of the shares after their divorce, Jeff Bezos is currently “worth” about $ 200 billion, according to Forbes magazine.
He is leaving the management of his company on a daily basis to spend more time with other projects, such as his other company, Blue Origin, which will make its first tourist flight in space on July 20 with Jeff Bezos as its passenger. The businessman also owns the Washington Post and has stated that he wants to devote his time and money to the fight against climate change.
Victim of her success?
Jeff Bezos is leaving at a time when Amazon, which employs more than 800,000 people in the United States after its activity increased sharply during the pandemic, is facing a lot of criticism from workers’ advocates or regulators.
Amazon claims that the company offers a minimum wage of $ 15 and various benefits, but critics have repeatedly denounced an obsession with efficiency, which risks leading to employees being treated like machines.
In his last annual letter to shareholders in April, following the failure of a trade union attempt at a group warehouse in Alabama, Jeff Bezos acknowledged that the group needed to improve the way it treats its employees and promised that Amazon would “The best employer on Earth”.
Concerned about the growing control exercised by some tech giants across sectors of the economy, regulators are considering taking steps to partially dismantle Amazon.
Amazon could thus “fall victim to its own success,” says Kay.
However, if the group should be divided into more entities, each of them “will prosper in its own market”, he predicts. “I can quite easily imagine a scenario in which the sum of the parts is higher than the consolidated whole. The shareholders are not expected to be hurt “.
Source: ΑΠΕ – ΜΠΕ