Jeff Bezos To Rule Planet Under Different Title Starting In Q3

Amazon turned in an impressive set of results on Tuesday after the closing bell on Wall Street, but that was overshadowed by the company’s announcement that Jeff Bezos will be stepping aside as CEO.

Andy Jassy, who runs AWS, will step into what it’s probably fair to call the biggest corporate shoes on Earth, a planet Bezos will soon run under the title “Executive Chair.”

Here’s what Bezos had to say:

Amazon is what it is because of invention. We do crazy things together and then make them normal. We pioneered customer reviews, 1-Click, personalized recommendations, Prime’s insanely-fast shipping, Just Walk Out shopping, the Climate Pledge, Kindle, Alexa, marketplace, infrastructure cloud computing, Career Choice, and much more. If you do it right, a few years after a surprising invention, the new thing has become normal. People yawn. That yawn is the greatest compliment an inventor can receive. When you look at our financial results, what you’re actually seeing are the long-run cumulative results of invention. Right now I see Amazon at its most inventive ever, making it an optimal time for this transition.

Frankly, I’ve never used most of those “inventions,” but I suppose that speaks to my own self-imposed isolation and affinity for shopping either in-person or else on boutique sites.

Bezos’s transition will take place in the third quarter, by which time his net worth could be around half-of-one-GOP-stimulus-package. Although he was leapfrogged by Elon Musk in 2021, Bezos had a spectacular 2020.

As for the company’s fourth quarter results, sales were $125.56 billion. That was up 44% YoY. The top-end of the range was $123.2 billion. Like Apple, Amazon now has a $100 billion quarter on its resume.

On the bottom line, EPS of $14.09 more than doubled from a year ago. The range of estimates there was $4.51 to $11.16. Operating income of $6.87 billion was up 77% YoY. More than half of that came from AWS, where net sales rose 28%. That was near the low-end of the range and a slight miss.

The forecast looked fine, at first glance anyway. Amazon sees net sales up between 33% and 40% in Q1 (YoY) or, between $100 billion and $106 billion. That’s ahead of consensus, which was looking for $95.72 billion. The top-end of the range there was $101.2 billion.

As ever, these figures are hard to contemplate. They’re just “big numbers.”

I suppose all we can do now is hope Bezos doesn’t take up pumping Dogecoin and Reddit forums on Twitter once he makes his “transition” later this year.


 

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4 thoughts on “Jeff Bezos To Rule Planet Under Different Title Starting In Q3

  1. One of the best businesses ever created, love them or hate them.

    How they have executed over the years is amazing. Few failures along the way to speak of. Plowed it all back into the growth. Couple of lucky breaks. Good timing. Anyone in product development knows how hard it is to launch a product into market. They have done so many times. What a success story.

    Will be interesting to see where he puts his attention. Perhaps some philanthropic aims are waiting to be fulfilled.

  2. This is not a perfect analysis…

    GOOG Income for last 12 months – $48.1 – taxes of $7.8 = Net Income $40.3 B, Market Cap – 1.4B
    AMZN Income for last 12 months $24.2 – taxes of $2.5 = Net Income $21.3 B, Market Cap – 1.7B
    jobs destroyed by Amzn (perhaps 2-10million in retail WW), Google (~perhaps 20-100K media WW)

    “Amazon recognized front-line employees by investing $2.5 billion in additional pay in 2020. This is on top of the company’s industry-leading starting wage of at least $15 an hour, which is double the federal minimum wage.”

    Yale’s law school put out a piece a few years ago the “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox” .

    Charge the credit cards on order – pay the suppliers 90 days later – pretend you are generating a lot of cash, but in reality no different than a growing supermarket chain. (excluding AWS which is impressive).

  3. I just posted a “one-click” request to my local library for “Tropic Thunder” (alluded to in the post following this one).

    The local library likes to include on the check-out receipt a tally of the amount of money saved by using the library rather than buying from Amazon. I think I’ve reached the $1,000 level in savings over the 2+ year membership – there is no prize, other than the continued good will of the local librarians.

NEWSROOM crewneck & prints