Amazon will eliminate another nine thousand jobs in the coming weeks, CEO Andy Jassy announced Monday in a memo sent to staff.
It would be the second major round of layoffs in the company’s history, following last January’s announcement that it would eliminate 18,000 positions.
Technology companies have announced dozens of job cuts this year after increasing their payrolls during the pandemic.
In the message, Jassy exclaims that the decision was made after the second phase of the company’s annual planning process concluded this month. He added that Amazon will continue to hire in some strategic areas.
“Some will ask why we didn’t announce these cuts when we announced the others a couple of months ago. The short answer is that not all teams had completed their analyses by late fall; and rather than making these assessments in haste without due care, I could share these decisions as soon as they were made so that people have the information as quickly as possible,” the CEO stresses.
The layoffs announced Monday will affect profitable areas for the company, including its AWS cloud unit and its burgeoning advertising business. There will also be layoffs at gaming platform Twitch and at PXT, in charge of human resources and other functions.
Earlier cuts also affected PXT, the company’s retail division, which encompasses its e-commerce business, in addition to physical stores such as Amazon Fresh and Amazon Go, and other departments such as the one that runs the Alexa virtual assistant.
Like other tech companies, such as Meta, which owns Facebook, and Alphabet, which owns Google, Amazon increased hiring during the pandemic to meet demand from homebound customers.
Amazon’s workforce, in warehouses and offices, doubled to more than 1.6 million people in about two years. But demand slowed as the worst of the pandemic subsided.
Jassy said Monday that, given the economic uncertainty and the “uncertainty that exists in the near future,” the company has opted to become more efficient.
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