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Amazon creates cloud and retail CEO positions

Amazon has promoted two of its leaders, giving the tech giant a Worldwide Consumer CEO as well as a CEO for its cloud computing business, Amazon Web Services.
Written by Asha Barbaschow, Contributor

Retail giant Amazon has announced the appointment of two of its business leaders to CEOs.

In a blog post made Thursday evening, Amazon confirmed that Jeff Wilke will become the CEO of Worldwide Consumer, with the head of Amazon Web Services (AWS), Andy Jassy, to also receive a CEO title.

According to Amazon, the official appointment comes as the conglomerate's retail and cloud computing businesses have both experienced exponential growth.

"Marketplace, Prime, and AWS are examples of bold bets at Amazon that worked, and they've become our three big pillars," Amazon said.

"As we've grown as a company and those three big pillars have also grown, we've decided it makes sense to change the titles of the leaders of those businesses."

Instantly shuttering speculation of a possible role shakeup, Amazon confirmed it was just Wilke and Jassy that are receiving new titles.

"This is not a reorganisation, but rather a recognition of the roles they've played for a while," the company said.

Earlier this week, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said AWS was growing faster than Amazon did saying the cloud computing business was also larger than its e-commerce parent was at the same age.

In just over 10 years, AWS has grown into a business that will reach annual sales of $10bn, Bezos said in his annual shareholder letter for 2015

AWS' operating income of $687 million in Q4 2015 was more than it made during the whole of 2014 and Bezos boasted that in the 10 years since starting as a cloud storage service in the US, it now had 33 availability zones in 12 regions worldwide, with more to come.

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