Amazon will cut an additional 9,000 jobs in the coming weeks as part of an effort to streamline costs, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said in a memo to Amazon employees Monday.
This measure comes on top of the more than 18,000 jobs that Amazon has announced it wants to cut as part of a workforce reduction that began in November 2022.
“Given the economic uncertainty in which we live and the uncertainty that reigns in the near future, we have chosen to rationalize our costs and our workforce”, explains Andy Jassy. “The fundamental principle of our annual planning this year was to be less greedy while doing so in a way that allows us to continue to invest vigorously in key long-term customer experiences that we believe can significantly improve the lives of our customers. »
AWS in turmoil
This latest round of cost-cutting will primarily impact Amazon’s cloud computing unit, AWS, and its PXT group, which deals with human resources among other things. Game streaming service Twitch will also see cost cuts, along with Amazon’s advertising business, the CEO said. These entities had been spared by the last redundancy plan. Affected employees will be notified in April.
Like other major tech companies, Amazon had exploded its payroll in 2020 and 2021 by recruiting massively, peaking at 1.6 million employees. The context of the Covid-19 pandemic had greatly increased its e-commerce activities, but also cloud computing and SVOD and streaming, with its Prime Video and Twitch services.
With the November 2022 layoff announcements, the number of people laid off by Amazon stands at 27,000, or 1.7% of Amazon’s global workforce.
Amazon Go shut down
Since then, Amazon has also given up the development of its physical stores without checkout, the Amazon Go. A third of the sites have been closed, without giving up, assures the group. Eight stores, located in San Francisco, New York and Seattle, will close. 21 stores of the same type continue to operate, but plans for new locations are frozen.
Since 2022, 300,000 jobs have been lost across the Atlantic in the field of technology. Since January 2023, 12,000 positions have been cut at Google, 1,000 at Microsoft, and 10,000 more at Meta, which has cut nearly 25% of its workforce in the space of a few months.