Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said Wednesday that the world's second-largest company by revenue has been trying to streamline costs as it navigates the uncertain economic environment.
While speaking at The New York Times DealBook summit, Jassy said that the economy is going to test the long term resolve of a lot of companies over the next few years. He said that many people will decide to stop doing anything that's not their core revenue generating businesses.
Jassy said that the online retailer is in the process of streamlining costs in a lot of different areas while investing in things that it believes will affect the company in the long term.
This is his first public comment since The New York Times first reported earlier this month that Amazon was planning to lay off 10,000 tech and corporate workers.
People familiar with the matter told the Times that the cuts would affect the company's devices organization, retail division, and human resources.
Jassy said Wednesday that while there are a lot of things Amazon is doing in the devices organization that he is optimistic about, there are other tings that they don't see as really big needle movers. He said that in those cases, we either wound those down or slowed those down to streamline a bit as part of that cost exercise.
The people who were familiar with the matter told the Wall Street Journal that Jassy began a cost-cutting review of the company shortly before the Times reported the pending layoffs.
Amazon had warned employees in underperforming units to look for another job as the company makes cuts due to the uncertain economic environment, sources told the Journal.
Before that, the company instituted a hiring freeze saying it wanted to balance our hiring and investments with being thoughtful about the economy.