Jeff Bezos exit could bring Amazon shift to business-to-business

Amazon chief Jeff Bezos’ decision to put his cloud computing chief in charge of the whole company could signal a shift in the group’s focus towards more business-to-business operations, analysts have said.

The firm’s founder announced last night he was handing the reins to Andy Jassy, who set up and runs the AWS cloud computing division that powers about 45% of the world’s cloud-hosted websites.

AWS was already the biggest profit generator at Amazon before lockdowns drove businesses to digitise their systems and power them remotely through the cloud. It has grown massively since.

Allen Bonde, research director at analyst Forrester, said: “While consumer e-commerce is a big market, B2B is an even bigger prize. Picking a leader who is driving their main enterprise offering may indicate the future of Amazon is in fact selling more to businesses than consumers.”

There had been talk on Wall Street last year that AWS may split from Amazon’s consumer businesses. This was exacerbated after WalMart asked its suppliers not to use web hosting from a firm it considered a rival.