At least no one will accuse Andy Jassy of phoning it in.
Amazon . com’s new CEO didn’t appear on the company’s second-quarter call Thursday afternoon. That continues a long tradition: Founder and former chief Jeff Bezos hasn’t participated in those calls since April of 2009, according to a transcript search on S&P Global Market Intelligence. For Mr. Bezos, the habit seemed part of an intense time-management strategy. He admitted in an onstage interview for Business Insider’s Ignite conference in 2014 that he spends just six hours a year on investor relations, claiming then that he only meets with long-term investors “with low portfolio turns.”
Whether Mr. Jassy will be afforded the same luxury remains to be seen. He formally took over the CEO job on July 5—after the second-quarter ended. But the first report under his watch still turned out to be a doozy, with Amazon’s revenue and operating income missing Wall Street’s targets and sending the stock tumbling.
While running the company’s AWS cloud business, he did show at least one early sign of being more out-front with investors by presenting at a Goldman Sachs conference early last year—something his predecessor never did.
But Mr. Jassy is a big tech CEO now, and his equally busy peers at Apple Inc., Microsoft Corp. , Alphabet Inc. and Facebook Inc. all participate in their quarterly calls. Amazon investors gave Mr. Bezos a pass; the stock has returned more than 4,000% since he stopped appearing on the company’s calls, outperforming Apple, Microsoft and Google’s parent over the same time. Mr. Jassy might not get cut quite as much slack.
