Amazon CEO Andy Jassy claims he ignores the stock price. After losing half their worth in 2022 due to recession worries and a dismal year for tech stocks, Amazon’s CEO Andy Jassy claimed he doesn’t pay much attention to the stock price.
In an interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin on Thursday’s “Squawk Box,” Jassy remarked, “I don’t spend a lot of my time concentrating on the stock price.”
Jassy has stated that he is more interested in the stock’s long-term performance than in any single point in time.
Read more: YouTube Premium videos on iOS have higher quality than those on Android.
He remarked that it might be higher or lower at any time, but what you do for clients over the long haul matters most.
For Amazon, 2022 was the worst year for stock performance since the dot-com meltdown of 2000, when shares fell 80%. Its stock price has recovered this year, increasing by more than 18%. The share price is down 35% from a year ago, however.
Jassy’s salary plummeted in 2022 due to the fall in stock prices. According to securities records, Jassy got nearly $1.3 million in pay last year. When Jassy succeeded Jeff Bezos as CEO in 2021, he received a compensation package worth about $212 million, the majority of which was in the form of Amazon stock.
Amazon disclosed in its proxy statement on Thursday that it did not issue Jassy any shares in 2022.
Investors have praised Jassy in recent months for its cost-cutting initiatives. During the height of the epidemic, Amazon experienced a recruiting and construction frenzy in response to the surge in online sales. Last year, demand began to level down, and Jassy and other Amazon execs have since conceded they overestimated the surge’s longevity.
Amazon has begun the most significant round of layoffs in its 29-year history. The company has also halted corporate hiring and scaled back on numerous experimental programs. Once its footprint grew and it paid more money to transport goods promptly from one end of the country to the other, the business took steps to reevaluate its fulfillment network to manage costs better, Jassy stated in his shareholder letter on Thursday.
The issues are not limited to price increases. Amazon’s retail and cloud computing divisions are experiencing sluggish growth as price-conscious consumers hold off on discretionary spending and companies reduce cloud expenditure in response to increased prices and a poor economic outlook.
Jassy writes in his open letter, “AWS faces short-term obstacles right now as firms are being more conservative in spending given the harsh, present macroeconomic conditions.” This is even though AWS is expected to increase 29% year-over-year (“YoY”) in 2022 on a revenue base of $62B.
The future is bright, as Jassy said. As the CEO put it, “I think we have a lot to look forward to because we were able to meaningfully cut our costs while at the same time keeping the long-term strategic investments that we feel may meaningfully transform consumer experiences in Amazon for the long term.”
