Insight - Jeff Bezos’ successor points Amazon toward the cloud

Strong footing: An Amazon.com delivery driver carries a customer order in Westcliff-on-Sea, the UK. Amazon posted adjusted fourth-quarter earnings per share of US$14.09, almost double Wall Street’s US$7.34 estimate, along with record-breaking revenue of US$125.6bil. — Bloomberg

AMAZON.COM Inc’s earnings came on Tuesday – Groundhog Day. And that’s fitting in one way because the e-commerce giant, like the namesake movie that repeats the same day again and again, added another spectacular performance to a long streak of the same. Except this day was unlike any other in the company’s history.

In the same breath that Amazon announced its latest quarterly results, it said its founder Jeff Bezos will step down as CEO later this year. He’ll be succeeded by Andy Jassy, now head of Amazon Web Services (AWS), the company’s cloud-computing powerhouse. The momentous development signals the importance of cloud services to the company’s future. It also came as the company turned in its most dominant financial performance.