Business this week

Business this week

Taking markets by surprise, Jeff Bezos said he would stand down as Amazon's chief executive later this year, telling his “fellow Amazonians” in a letter that he wants to devote more time to his climate-change project, the Washington Post and other business and charity interests. Mr Bezos, who has led the company he founded since 1994, will become executive chairman. The new CEO will be Andy Jassy, who heads Amazon's cloud-computing division, the most profitable part of the company. See article.King of the retail jungleAmazon's quarterly sales passed $125bn for the first time in the final three months of 2020. For the year as a whole revenues were up by more than a third to $386bn, almost $100bn more than Apple's revenues for last year.Google's parent company, Alphabet, also surpassed expectations in the fourth quarter, as sales from advertising jumped by more than a fifth, year on year. Its cloud-services division, however, made an operating loss, for the quarter and for the whole year.Following a bout of volatile trading, in which the S&P 500 had its worst week since October, stockmarkets quietened down. Investors remain nervous about the co-ordinated action of a group of retail traders, through message boards such