Amazon plans to lay off 9,000 corporate and technology employees by the end of April, adding to the 18,000 positions that were cut at the end of last year and this January, Andy Jassy, the company’s chief executive officer, speak in a note to employees on Monday.
The new rounds of layoffs, which make up less than 3% of the company’s workforce, will target workers in some of Amazon’s most profitable divisions that had previously been overlooked, including both Amazon’s advertising and cloud business. These two business segments have much higher profit margins than Amazon’s core retail business, according to financial analysts and filings.
Mr. Jassy wrote that the annual planning session that the company’s leaders concluded last week focused on streamlining costs and headcount.
“The most important tenet of our annual plan this year is to be leaner while doing so in a way that allows us to remain strongly invested in the key long-term customer experience we believe in. that can dramatically improve the lives of customers and Amazon as a whole,” he wrote.
For more than a year, Jassy has pursued cost-cutting at Amazon. The company quickly added staff during the pandemic and Prioritize some projects lack of clear ways to be profitable. He withdrew the expansion of the company’s warehousing operations, and pause work in the largest phase of Amazon’s planned second headquarters near Washington, DC
layoffs in big tech
After a massive hiring pandemic, some tech companies are now pulling back.
- A growing list: Alphabet, Microsoft, Launch And meta are among the tech giants that have cut jobs amid worries about economic recession.
- Sales force: The company said it would lay off 10% of its staff, a decision that appears to go against the stated commitment of co-founder and chief executive Marc Benioff. for its workers.
- New parents hit hard: At tech companies that have spent recent years expanding paid parental leave, parents are already feeling the consequences of mass layoffs. in a special way visceral.
- Tech’s generational breakdown: Recent cuts have been Open eyes for young workers. But for older employees who experienced the dot-com collapse, it wasn’t a shock.
The company froze hiring last fall and by November planned to lay off about 10,000 employees, with a goal of expanding to 18,000 by early January.
Amazon has about 380,000 corporate employees by the end of 2022, according to a person familiar with the company’s workforce.
Most of Amazon’s roughly 1.5 million employees are hourly people who power their warehouse operations.
The tech industry is experiencing its biggest contraction since the dot-com bust in the early 2000s. Nearly every major tech company has laid off workers. Last week Meta, Facebook’s parent company, announced plans to lay off about 10,000 employees, or about 13% of its workforce, part of a plan that its chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, Is called “effective year.” It laid off 11,000 workers at the end of last year.
At Amazon, last year, layoffs initially affected employees working on devices and the Alexa voice assistant, then they spread to other departments, including teams working on plans for Amazon. automated stores, drones, and the company’s broader consumer retail business. Human resources staff – especially recruiters – are also affected.
During the most recent quarter, which ended in December, Amazon reported almost no profitpartly due to unexpected weakness in its cloud business.
Twitch, the live-streaming site popular with gamers that Amazon bought in 2014, says it has laid off more than 400 people, about 22% of its total staff. Dan Clancy, Twitch’s chief executive officer, said in a blog post in an uncertain economy, “revenue and user growth have not kept pace with our expectations. Mr. Clancy took over as chief executive from longtime Twitch leader Emmett Shear last week.
Amazon’s stock price fell more than 2% in midday trading on Monday.
Mr Jassy said that management has yet to determine which workers will be laid off, but they expect to do so in mid to late April. He said the company could still pursue some “limited hiring” in strategic areas.
Kellen Browning Contribution reports from San Francisco.
