A few days before Black Friday, the New York Times announces that Amazon is preparing to lay off nearly 10,000 employees. In question, the poor performance of the group in times of economic crisis.
Among the tech giants, the layoffs do not only affect social networks. While Twitter and Facebook have experienced massive layoffs in recent weeks, after Elon Musk bought the former and cut 13% of the latter’s workforce, Amazon could be the next American group to have to part with several thousand employees. its employees.
In an article posted on Monday, the New York Times indicates that the Seattle firm could part with nearly 10,000 of its employees in the next few days.
Unlike Facebook, however, this wave of layoffs would be relatively contained and would represent only 3% of Amazon’s payroll in the United States and less than 1% of its 1.5 million employees in the whole world. Still, this would be the biggest wave of layoffs ever launched by the American group.
Layoffs in sales to individuals, in HR and in engineers
Concretely, according to information from the New York daily, Amazon would like to reduce its payroll in several sectors, whether it is its voice assistant Amazon Alexa, in its retail division and in human resources. The layoffs should be communicated during the week, at a time that is strategically essential for Amazon, one week from Black Friday and while e-commerce sites make the bulk of their annual turnover in the last months of the year, before the holiday season.
According to New York Times, the planned layoffs would be justified by a significant increase in the number of Amazon employees after the confinement, with a doubling of its workforce in two years. However, like Facebook, the e-commerce group has been hit hard by the economic crisis since the beginning of the year: “The company faced high costs following its decision to overinvest and expand rapidly, as changing shopping habits and high inflation reduced sales“.
In short, like Facebook, Amazon recruited heavily during and after the various phases of confinement, believing in a long-term change in consumption habits. However, the current economic crisis must have pushed the Seattle company to review its plans. The group’s market valuation has also fallen in a few years, from 1888 billion dollars in July 2021 to 917 billion dollars in November 2022, thus returning to its pre-pandemic capitalization.
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