Amazon Web Services Inc. head Andy Jassy will officially become the chief executive officer of parent company Amazon.com Inc. on July 5, Jeff Bezos revealed during a virtual shareholder meeting today.

Bezos announced plans to step down from the CEO role in February and named Jassy (pictured) as his successor. At the time, the company said that the leadership change would take place in the third quarter but didn’t specify a precise date.

Bezos will move into the role of executive chair, while Jassy is set to be replaced in his current post as CEO of AWS by former Tableau Software Inc. CEO Adam Selipsky. Selipsky worked for 11 years at the cloud giant before his stint at Tableau.

Jassy is a longtime Amazon insider who joined the company in 1997, the year it went public. The company listed on the Nasdaq stock exchange at $18 a share and at the time hadn’t yet reached $150 million in annual revenues. Last quarter, Amazon generated $108.52 billion in revenues and posted a $8.1 billion operating profit. 

Under Jassy’s leadership, AWS has grown from a business that offered just a single service when it launched in 2004 to the industry’s largest cloud computing provider. AWS generates nearly half of Amazon’s operating profit and boasts a $54 billion annual sales run rate. Its cloud platform, which in 2004 consisted only of Amazon Simple Storage Service, now features a broad array of solutions ranging from foundational infrastructure services to on-demand satellite ground stations and managed quantum computers.

Commenting on Jassy’s appointment as CEO of Amazon in today’s shareholder meeting, Bezos told investors that “he has the highest of high standards and I guarantee that Andy will never let the universe make us typical.” Bezos added that “he has the energy needed to keep alive in us what has made us special.”

The Amazon founder also addressed a question about the company’s impact on market competition, a topic that is likely to continue being a subject of discussion following the July 5 leadership change. “I say we face intense competition from well-established companies, everywhere we do business, in every industry,” Bezos said. “There are many successful, small, fast growing retailers that are doing incredibly well selling online. Some aren’t even that small. They’re multibillion-dollar companies. And the IT industry too, of course, is thriving.”

As for why July 5 is the date Jassy will officially take over the reins at Amazon, Bezos explained that “we chose that date because it’s sentimental for me, the day Amazon was incorporated in 1994, exactly 27 years ago.”

Photo: SiliconANGLE