According to a statement sent to employees on Monday by CEO Andy Jassy, Amazon plans to axe 9,000 additional jobs in the coming weeks.
In addition to the 18,000 employees the internet giant announced it will let go in January, the job cutbacks would represent the second-largest round of layoffs in corporate history. Yet, during the epidemic, the company’s employment doubled as recruiting was on the rise across practically the entire tech industry.
Tens of thousands of job losses have been announced by tech corporations this year.
Jassy said in the memo that the extra job layoffs were necessary due to the second stage of the company’s yearly planning process being finished this month. Amazon, he claimed, will continue to hire in a few key locations.
Some people might wonder why we didn’t disclose these role reductions at the same time as the ones we did a few months ago. The quick explanation is that not all of the teams finished their analyses in the late fall. Rather than rushing through these assessments without the necessary care, we elected to disclose these decisions as we made them so others could learn about them as soon as possible, Jassy added.
The company’s profitable divisions, including its AWS cloud computing branch and its expanding advertising business, will be affected by the job losses announced on Monday. Along with Amazon’s PXT divisions, which handle personnel resources and other duties, Twitch, the gaming platform that the company controls, will also experience some layoffs.
PXT, the company’s shops division, which includes its e-commerce operation as well as brick-and-mortar stores like Amazon Fresh and Amazon Go, as well as other divisions like the one that controls the virtual assistant Alexa, had previously experienced prior layoffs.
Although the first phase of the business’s headquarters building project in northern Virginia will open this June with 8,000 employees, the corporation said earlier this month that it will halt development.
Amazon increased recruiting during the epidemic to match the demand from homebound Americans who were increasingly purchasing goods online to protect themselves from the virus, similar to other digital businesses like Facebook parent company Meta and Google parent company Alphabet.
In just two years, the number of employees working for Amazon in offices and warehouses increased to more than 1.6 million. But as the pandemic’s severe symptoms subsided, demand decreased. Last year, the business started postponing or scrapping its warehouse expansion plans.
Along with other cost-cutting measures, Amazon has recently closed a company that had been selling fabrics for almost 30 years and its hybrid virtual, in-home care service Amazon Care amid mounting concern about the possibility of a recession.
In light of the unstable economy and the “uncertainty that looms in the foreseeable future,” according to Jassy, the business has decided to become more simplified.
He claimed that the teams affected by the most recent wave of layoffs have not finished choosing whose positions will be terminated. By mid-to-late April, the business intends to make those decisions and notify people who will be laid off.
