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Amazon is reshaping its consumer division with a new CEO and a new name: supermarket specialist Doug Herrington will head up Amazon Stores, revealing an increased focus on physical shops.
Consumers become stores
Will Amazon focus even more on physical shops? It would seem so, now that CEO Andy Jassy has announced a new shake-up of the executive team. With the unexpected departure of the chief of Amazon’s Consumer division, Dave Clark, Jassy is taking the opportunity to reorganise the entire department.
From now on, it will no longer be called Consumer, but “Worldwide Amazon Stores”. Doug Herrington will head the renewed division: no coincidence, as Herrington has been working for Amazon for seventeen years and was hired precisely to develop the e-commerce giant’s FMCG offer. He was also the one who launched AmazonFresh, Amazon’s first own supermarket formula, in 2007.
“Only 1 % of worldwide market share”
At the same time, the logistics department has been brought together under one CEO, John Felton. Felton has also been with Amazon for seventeen years. Or as Andy Jassy, Jeff Bezos’ successor, informs his staff, “this is a very strong and experienced leadership team”.
“It’s worth remembering that Amazon currently only represents about 1 % of the worldwide retail market segment share, and 85 % of that worldwide market segment share still resides in physical stores”, Jassy says, emphasising the importance of physical retail. For now, at least: “If you believe that equation will change over time (which I do), there’s *a lot* of potential for us. I believe we’re still in the early days of what’s possible.”
