Amazon Inc, the e-commerce giant, will commence an additional layoff of 9,000 workers, making this wave of layoffs the biggest in the company’s history.
The layoffs, which Chief Executive Officer Andy Jassy revealed internally on Monday, will mostly affect the Amazon Web Services, human resources, advertising, and the Twitch live streaming service operations and will take place over the next few weeks.
These layoffs come on top of the ones that were announced in November and continued into January. Almost 18,000 employees were affected throughout that period.
After a recruiting binge during the pandemic that left Amazon with an excess of employees, the e-commerce company began firing largely corporate staff.
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Amazon aims to streamline processes and cost cuts with the layoff.
Amazon has chosen to lay off more staff in order to save money. The economics and uncertainties that existed were considered, as Jassy put it.
In addition, the second stage of the company’s yearly budgeting process, known internally as “OP2,” was recently completed.
“Given the uncertain economy in which we inhabit, and the uncertainty that exists shortly,” Jassy noted in a memo later published on Amazon’s corporate blog, “we have opted to be more efficient in our costs and staffing.”
Amazon’s stock price in New York City, on the other hand, fell $1.3 to $97.71.
The stock has gained approximately 16% this year.
“The overarching tenet of our annual planning this year was to be leaner while still investing robustly in the key long-term customer experiences that we believe can meaningfully improve customers’ lives and Amazon as a whole,” Jassy said.
Twitch’s CEO, Dan Clancy, acknowledged allegations of 400 job cuts at its subsidiary in his own blog post. Amazon had 1.54 million employees worldwide as of the end of December.
The majority of them work as hourly warehouse workers, packing and shipping goods. The corporation reported having about 350,000 corporate workers before the first round of layoffs occurred in November. Amazon has attempted to resurrect its retail business on several occasions, but the current downturn has also harmed AWS, the company’s principal source of revenue in recent years.
According to Amazon CFO Brian Olsavsky, the cloud business will grow more slowly over the “next few quarters.” Although Amazon’s advertising business is highly profitable, its growth has also slowed. Another stage of the company’s yearly planning process, according to Jassy, coincided with the most recent round of layoffs.
He stated that Amazon would like teams in charge of layoffs to decide which roles will be eliminated by mid to late April.
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Other layoffs from the Tech industry
Less than a week ago, Facebook owner Meta Platforms Inc. revealed that it would be laying off another 10,000 staff and shutting roughly 5,000 additional unfilled jobs.
In a recent company meeting, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told staff that the current economic climate of layoffs and reorganisation might endure “many years.”
Other tech giants, like Google’s parent company Alphabet Inc., Microsoft Corp., Dell Technologies Inc., and International Business Machines Corp., have also cut the number of employees.
According to data compiled by Bloomberg, as of early February, over 67,000 jobs have been eliminated throughout the industry since the beginning of the year.
This is an alarming trend that began in 2022, when the IT industry declared 97,171 layoffs, a 649 percent increase from the previous year, as reported by the consulting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc.
However, the industry layoffs might continue as the year proceeds.