By Akash Sriram and Jeffrey Dastin
(Reuters) -Amazon.com Inc said on Friday the chief executive officer of its worldwide consumer business, Dave Clark, was leaving the company after 23 years to pursue other opportunities.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said he expects to be ready with an update on Clark’s succession over the next few weeks. Clark’s last day at work will be July 1.
Clark, who joined Amazon in 1999 right after graduating from his MBA program, has led teams that designed fulfillment centers and transportation networks.
He became the CEO of Amazon’s worldwide consumer business in January last year just before the company’s e-commerce sales surged during the pandemic.
Clark’s departure is the second high-profile exit this week after Meta Platforms Inc’s operations chief, Sheryl Sandberg, announced that she was leaving the company after 14 years.
In a statement he posted on Twitter https://twitter.com/davehclark/status/1532753944778141697, Clark said he had for a while told confidantes he wanted to leave Amazon “to start a new journey” but waited for the right moment.
“I feel confident that time is now,” he said, adding that Amazon has “a solid multi-year plan to fight the inflationary challenges we are facing in 2022.”
Tumult in Amazon’s warehouse and delivery operation that Clark long steered has been relentless since COVID-19 began spreading more than two years ago. As home-shopping orders jumped, workers fell ill and the company had to usher in more than 150 changes, from adding temperature scanners to technology for monitoring social distancing.
The change coincided with an increase in union organizing and scrutiny of Amazon’s safety conditions, pay and productivity tracking. Clark defended Amazon vociferously, occasionally trading barbs with critics. “I often say we are the Bernie Sanders of employers, but that’s not quite right because we actually deliver a progressive workplace,” he tweeted last year.
More recently Clark has contended with a shortage of workers willing to fill warehouse jobs and higher gas prices. That led to the company’s first-ever fuel and inflation surcharge on merchants who pay Amazon to fulfill their products in the United States, among other measures to address costs.
(Reporting by Akash Sriram in Bengaluru and Jeffrey Dastin in Palo Alto, Calif.; Additional reporting by Tiyashi Datta and Nivedita Balu in Bengaluru; Editing by Shinjini Ganguli and Lisa Shumaker)
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