Amazon waves off Jeff Bezos with record-breaking profits

Jeff Bezos is stepping down as CEO of Amazon. The founder ends on a high note: 2020 was a record year with 38 per cent more sales and a profit increase of no less than 84 per cent.

100 billion more in sales

Amazon’s growth in times of Covid-19 was unprecedented, as is now confirmed by the company’s annual figures: the e-commerce giant sold 386 billion dollars (320.7 billion euros) last year, which meant a growth of 100 billion dollars or 38 per cent. Net profits even rose by 84 per cent compared with a year earlier, despite the high costs Amazon had to incur due to the pandemic.

In the fourth quarter, sales rose by 44 per cent to 125.6 billion dollars (105 billion euros), while net profits were 21.3 billion dollars (17.7 billion euros). This is more than double the profit in the same period a year earlier.

Focus on novelties

After twenty-five years, it is a sign for founder Jeff Bezos that he can step aside: he will step down as CEO and become executive chairman. In this role, the multimillionaire can focus on his favourite part: innovation and new initiatives. This, in combination with Amazon’s 31 billion dollars (26 billion euro) mountain of cash, means that we can expect a lot of innovation and takeovers in the future.

His successor as CEO will be Andy Jassy, today’s chief executive – and at the time founder – of Amazon’s cloud service AWS. Jassy has also been active in the company since its origins. Choosing Jassy, once again shows how important Amazon Web Services is for the American giant: Amazon currently derives almost all of its profits from its server and data services, which it even supplies to the American government. AWS is expected to reach a turnover of about 40 billion dollars by 2020.