Over the coming weeks Amazon is going to cut more than 9,000 jobs in a new round of layoffs designed to make the company leaner in the face of mounting economic concerns.
The technology group, which announced in January it would shed more than 18,000 jobs, said in January that going further would be best for the company in the long term.
Amazon has announced 27,000 job cuts in the last few months, despite years of aggressive expansion. In January, the business said it would shut down three UK warehouses, affecting 1,200 workers.
A week ago, Meta Platforms, owner of Facebook and Instagram, unveiled a second wave of redundancies.
Andy Jassy, Chief Executive of Amazon, said for several years that most of our businesses added a significant amount of headcount. This made sense given what was happening in our businesses and economy as a whole.
We have decided to be more streamlined in our costs and headcount because of the uncertain economy in which we live and the uncertainty that exists in the near future. Shares in Amazon fell by $1.11, or 1.1 per cent, to $97.79 in New York. The company, valued at $1 trillion on the stock market and based in Seattle, Washington, has a wide range of interests including retail, streaming, cloud computing and advertising. It was founded in 1994 by Jeff Bezos.
Companies of all sizes have been battening down the hatches in the technology sector. Before Amazon's latest announcement, businesses across the industry had said they would cut almost 140,000 workers, according to Layoffs.fyi, a tracker.
The annual planning of Amazon was driven by the desire to be more efficient, Jassy stressed, while allowing us to invest in the key long-term customer experiences that we believe can meaningfully improve customers lives and Amazon as a whole. Some employees may ask why we didn't announce these role reductions with the ones we announced a couple of months ago, he acknowledged, describing how some of the Amazon divisions had not completed their analyses of operations in time.
Rather than rush through assessments without the appropriate diligence, we chose to share these decisions as we ve made so people had the information as soon as possible, Jassy said. The teams impacted by this note are not yet finished making final decisions on which roles will be impacted. Amazon is aiming to make these decisions by mid to late April.