Founder of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, will step down as the CEO of the global retail giant and become executive chairman later this year. The transition is slated for the third quarter of 2021 and Andy Jassy, who joined Amazon in 1997 as a marketing manager and made its Cloud arm Amazon Web Services (AWS) a distinct leader, is being named as his successor.

On Wednesday, Amazon posted a 38 per cent increase in net sales to $386.1 billion. The company’s net sales in same period in 2019 stood at $280.5 billion, reports said.

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Bezos started Amazon 27 years ago as a bookselling platform and since then, the company has been going through a tremendous transition-becoming the mega e-commerce giant.

In a note, to his employees, Bezos said, “As Exec Chair I will stay engaged in important Amazon initiatives but also have the time and energy I need to focus on the Day 1 Fund, the Bezos Earth Fund, Blue Origin, The Washington Post, and my other passions.”

His successor, Jassy founded Amazon Web Services (AWS) with a team of 57 people and in April 2016, he was promoted from senior vice president to the CEO of AWS.

Today, AWS has nearly a $50 billion annual run rate and is growing exponentially.

The Cloud arm of e-commerce giant Amazon is now the fifth largest enterprise IT company in the world, ahead of companies like SAP and Oracle, driven by the growth of cloud computing in the infrastructure technology space especially in the pandemic times.

“If you look at AWS, as an example, to grow to a $46 billion revenue run rate with 29 per cent (year-over-year) growth meant we had to grow at an incremental $10 billion in the last 12 months to get there; that is much larger than you’ll see elsewhere in the cloud,” Jassy said in December during the annual “Re: Invent” conference.

Born on January 13, 1968, Jassy graduated from Harvard College, where he was advertising manager of The Harvard Crimson, before earning an MBA from Harvard Business School.

He is also one of the minority owners of the Seattle Kraken in the National Hockey League.

A shy guy like Bezos, in his Twitter bio, Jassy describes himself as “married” and the “father of two kids”.

He is also a self-proclaimed “big sports/music/film fan,” and an “experienced buffalo wings eater”.

For him, India is one of the fastest growing markets.

“The business in the Asia-Pacific region is very broad and is growing very quickly. The business is growing rapidly in China, India, Singapore, Australia and South-East Asian countries,” he said during a press conference in 2018.