Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is stepping as CEO in the third quarter and will be replaced by Andy Jassy, who serves as chief executive of the company’s cloud technology division, AWS.
Bezos will assume the role of executive chairman.
The announcement was made Tuesday during Amazon’s fourth quarter earnings call.
“Right now I see Amazon at its most inventive ever, making it an optimal time for this transition,” Bezos said in a statement.
Bezos had stepped away from day-to-day operations, but has been recently re-engaged, with pandemic-era consumption expanding Amazon's ship-to-doorstep business to previously unimagined profitability.
On Tuesday, the company reported that net sales for 2020 increased 38% to $386.1 billion, with net income nearly doubling for the year to $21.3 billion.
In December, Bloomberg pegged Bezos's personal net worth at $182 billion.
Jassy joined Amazon in 1997 shortly after Bezos founded the company as an online seller of books. He founded Amazon Web Services (AWS) in 2003 with a team of 57 staffers, ultimately building it into the world's biggest provider of cloud-based computing services.
Generating between $100 million and $106 million in the fourth quarter alone, AWS's revenue could soon surpass the company it serves as a subsidiary.
