Amazon’s Leader on Alexa, Other Devices Plans to Leave

David Limp, Amazon.com’s devices chief, is planning to retire in the coming months in the latest departure of a longstanding top executive since Andy Jassy took over as chief executive of the e-commerce giant two years ago.

Limp’s planned departure would conclude a tenure of more than 13 years at the company, where he oversees Amazon’s Alexa and a portfolio of other services and gadgets that have in some cases proven popular but overall have struggled to make money. The Echo device line, in particular, has proven more challenging to monetize in that way, said people familiar with Limp’s plans.

Limp’s division has been a target of the cost cuts implemented by Jassy that over the past year have shed some 27,000 jobs across the company.

Limp’s planned exit marks another disruption for the core of Amazon senior leadership known as the S-Team, a number of whose members have departed over the past two years after relative stability on the management team before Jassy took the helm.

An Amazon spokesman confirmed Limp is leaving before the end of the year.

Last year, Amazon Consumer CEO Dave Clark left the company after 23 years, in part over friction with Jassy’s hands-on management style, The Wall Street Journal reported previously. Other S-Team departures since mid-2021 include Jeff Blackburn, who led the media and entertainment businesses; Alicia Boler Davis, senior vice president of global customer fulfillment; Charlie Bell, a top leader of Amazon’s cloud business; and Jay Carney, who was the top public-relations and public-policy executive.

Limp, 56 years old, started his career at Apple in the late 1980s, and went on to work at several other companies—including Palm, a leading brand of the personal digital assistants that preceded smartphones—before joining Amazon in 2010 to run its devices organization.

At the time, the company’s only blockbuster seller in that division was its Kindle e-reader. During his tenure, Amazon launched a number of hit products including the Echo smart speaker, Fire TV streaming media player and Fire tablets. It also launched an ill-fated smartphone dubbed the Fire phone that it later discontinued.

While Amazon has sold more than 500 million Alexa-enabled devices, the smart speakers largely sell without a profit on each unit. The Journal reported last year that the devices unit in some recent years had an annual operating loss of more than $5 billion.

Part of the strategy for Limp’s division has been to sell things that spur other sales for Amazon, but it has had differing success on that effort. The Kindle, the unit’s first product, is an example of that strategy working, as it fuels sales of ebooks that Amazon takes a cut of.

With the Echo device line, the company overestimated customer adoption of voice shopping—that is, people telling Alexa they want to buy something from Amazon—which still makes up a very small portion of the way customers use Echo devices.

Pumping advertisements through Echo devices is also challenging because users get frustrated with ads, especially outside of when they are listening to music on the devices. Most customers use their devices for simple commands such as asking it to set timers or for the weather forecast, neither of which makes Amazon money.

Write to Dana Mattioli at [email protected] and Jessica Toonkel at [email protected]