By Martin Heubel, Founder and Director of Consulterce, a strategy consultancy for B2C Household & CPG brands.
So what’s Amazon’s vision under Andy Jassy? Jeff Bezos was the driving force behind building an innovative tech company that put the customer first. His successor Andy Jassy has so far taken on the role of a profit optimiser across business units.
The customer is certainly no longer the main focus.
So it’s easy to get the impression that Jassy’s cautious focus on profit is almost the opposite philosophy of his predecessor Bezos. Jassy is slowing down expansion efforts in retail, consumer healthcare and devices divisions.
Yes, Covid led Amazon to overhire and over-expand. Especially on its logistics network. But the latter could also be seen as an opportunity rather than a weakness. After all, the existing warehouse capacities position Amazon well to become the dominating 3PL player in the logistics space.
And the push that the pandemic has given e-commerce is not fading. It’s simply normalising to more sustainable growth levels, with consumers continuing to return to the virtual shelf across product categories.
Great article from the Financial Times on the current state of Amazon
