Amazon is to cut a further 9,000 jobs over the coming weeks in a fresh round of lay-offs designed to make the company “leaner” in the face of mounting economic concerns.
The technology group, which announced in January that it would shed more than 18,000 roles from its workforce, said going further would be “best for the company” in the long term.
The latest lay-offs will predominantly affect employees in its cloud computing, advertising and people experience and technology solutions teams, as well as the Twitch streaming platform, Amazon said.
Drawing a line under years of aggressive expansion, Amazon has now announced some 27,000 job cuts in recent months. In January, the business also said it would shut three UK warehouses, affecting 1,200 workers.
Its latest round comes just a week after Meta Platforms, owner of Facebook and Instagram, unveiled a second wave of redundancies.
Andy Jassy, chief executive of Amazon, said: “For several years leading up to this one, most of our businesses added a significant amount of headcount. This made sense given what was happening in our businesses and the economy as a whole.
“However, given the uncertain economy in which we reside, and the uncertainty that exists in the near future, we have chosen to be more streamlined in our costs and headcount.”
Shares in Amazon retreated $1.11, or 1.1 per cent, to $97.79 in New York. The business, valued at $1 trillion on the stock market and based in Seattle, Washington, has a sprawling range of interests including retail, streaming, cloud computing and advertising. It was founded by Jeff Bezos in 1994.
Across the technology sector, companies of all sizes have been battening down the hatches. Before Amazon’s latest announcement, businesses across the industry had said they would cut almost 140,000 workers, according to Layoffs.fyi, a tracker.
Amazon’s annual planning was driven by a desire “to be leaner,” Jassy stressed, “while doing so in a way that enables us to still invest robustly 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 months ago,” he acknowledged, describing how some divisions within Amazon had not completed their analyses of operations in time.
“Rather than rush through these assessments without the appropriate diligence, we chose to share these decisions as we’ve made them so people had the information as soon as possible,” Jassy said. “The same is true for this note as the impacted teams are not yet finished making final decisions on precisely which roles will be impacted.”
Amazon is aiming to make these decisions by “mid to late April”.
