Shareholders reject "permanent separation of CEO and Chairman" to pave the way for Amazon's "AI ambitions"

According to the Zhitong Finance APP, shareholders of the American e-commerce and cloud computing giant Amazon (AMZN.US) voted against a key proposal to permanently separate the roles of Chief Executive Officer (CEO) and Chairman at the annual shareholders' meeting held on Wednesday local time, with 82% opposing the measure. The rejection of this proposal to permanently separate the positions ensures continued flexibility in Amazon's leadership adjustments, which is expected to provide a significant foundation for the management team led by Andy Jassy to continue driving performance expansion dominated by AI.

The proposal was initiated by the advocacy group "The Accountability Board," which argued that the company has not formalized the separation of the two roles in its corporate guidelines, thus "allowing the company's board of directors to freely combine the roles at any time and establish a leadership structure that they believe best supports operations and company development."

Amazon achieved the separation of roles in 2021: Jeff Bezos stepped down as CEO, with Andy Jassy taking over; Bezos continues to serve as Executive Chairman of the Board.

Analysts have stated that maintaining the combination of Bezos and Jassy in a flexible manner allows the company to leverage the founder's long-term perspective and capital network while relying on the current CEO's strong execution capabilities in AI and cloud computing to accelerate multi-round investments in partners like Anthropic and the ongoing planning of the Bedrock platform. If the separation of the two roles were to be enforced, it could hinder the board's ability to quickly adjust leadership during strategic turning points (such as mergers, reorganizations, or crises), which contradicts Amazon's consistent culture of "rapid iteration."

In opposing the proposal, Amazon's board stated that retaining the current structure allows the board to "decide on the most appropriate leadership model based on the specific operational circumstances of the company at any given time."

In a proxy statement, Amazon's board wrote: "Given our success under various leadership structures, the board believes that maintaining complete flexibility to adjust the leadership structure is more in the best interests of shareholders. Implementing this proposal would neither change the current leadership structure nor further enhance the independent oversight that the board already possesses."

Wall Street analysts remain nearly unanimous in their optimistic expectations for Amazon's e-commerce and cloud computing + AI business (i.e., AWS cloud platform) driving significant performance expansion. Over 95% of analysts tracked by Bloomberg have given Amazon a "buy" rating, with the current stock price trading at more than a 20% discount to analysts' average target price.

Brian White, an analyst from Monness Crespi Hardt & Co., recently reaffirmed his "buy" rating for Amazon with a 12-month target price of up to $265, noting that Amazon's profitability has yet to reach its long-term potential driven by expectations in cloud computing and AI. "Its growth paths in e-commerce, cloud computing (AWS), digital media, advertising, Alexa, robotics, and AI computing platforms are extremely attractive," the analyst stated. As of early trading on Friday, Amazon's stock price hovered around $200 Amazon's newly launched AI-upgraded voice assistant Alexa is seen as a new engine for long-term performance growth. Wall Street analysts generally expect Amazon's overall revenue growth rate to be 9.6% in 2025, potentially rising to 10.4% in 2026, driving the net profit margin significantly from 15% in 2025 to 20% in 2026.

The entire cloud computing business, along with AI application software development and AI computing power ecosystem, are the core factors behind Wall Street analysts' bullish outlook on Amazon's future stock price, which is why the highest target price on Wall Street reaches as high as $300. Amazon's management announced that it will invest approximately $100 billion this year, focusing on building AI infrastructure such as data centers, with the vast majority directed towards plans related to AWS and generative AI, and promised that "shareholders will ultimately be very satisfied." They also emphasized that the explosive demand from global enterprises for AI computing resources and AI application software deployment has not cooled at all due to tariff pressures.

Amazon and Microsoft (MSFT.US), the two leading cloud computing giants, are fully focused on developing ecosystems for B-end and C-end application software related to generative AI, aiming to significantly lower the technical barriers for non-IT professionals across various industries to develop AI applications, as well as providing a powerful cloud AI computing power platform, especially for cloud AI inference computing resources. Other software giants providing similar AI application software development platforms include Chinese cloud giant Alibaba (BABA.US) and the American "blue giant" IBM (IBM.US), with ServiceNow also offering a similar one-stop development platform.

Amazon AWS leads the market share in the cloud computing field by a wide margin, which also makes the AI application software development ecosystem launched by AWS—Amazon Bedrock—attractive to a large number of enterprise customers for one-stop development of various AI applications with a low technical threshold. In the fourth quarter, Amazon's cloud computing division AWS saw revenue grow 19% year-on-year to $28.8 billion, with the revenue growth rate of this cloud computing division accelerating for seven consecutive quarters under the joint push of Amazon Bedrock and core cloud computing business (IaaS + SaaS).

The latest financial report shows that Amazon's earnings per share for the first quarter of 2025 is $1.59, higher than Wall Street's general expectation of $1.37; revenue is $155.7 billion, also slightly above analysts' estimate of $155.2 billion; the revenue guidance range for this quarter is $159 billion to $164 billion, with the midpoint basically in line with the market expectation of $161.2 billion