Amazon plans to lay off another 9,000 employees

Amazon plans to lay off 9,000 corporate and technology employees by the end of April, adding to the 18,000 positions it already cut late last year and in January, Andy Jassy said on Monday. , the company’s chief executive, in a memo to employees.

The new layoffs, which represent around 3% of the company’s workforce, will target workers in some of Amazon’s most profitable divisions, which had previously been spared, including the cloud computing business of Amazon. Amazon and its advertising operations. According to financial analysts and filings, these two segments of the business are much higher-margin operations than Amazon’s core business.

Mr. Jassy wrote that company executives completed their annual planning session last week, where they focused on cost and workforce rationalization.

“The overarching principle of our annual planning this year was to be leaner 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 customers’ lives and Amazon as a whole,” he wrote.

For more than a year, Mr. Jassy has been pursuing cost reductions at Amazon. The company quickly added employees during the pandemic and prioritized some projects that lacked obvious ways to become profitable. He backtracked on expanding the company’s warehouse operations and suspended work on the larger phase of the company’s planned second headquarters near Washington, D.C.

The company froze hiring last fall and planned to lay off about 10,000 employees in November, a target that rose to 18,000 in early January.

Amazon employed about 1.54 million employees at the end of last year, down 4% from a year earlier. But most of those employees are hourly workers who fuel its warehouse operations.

The tech industry is suffering its biggest contraction since the dot-com breakup in the early 2000s. Almost every major tech company has laid off workers. Last week Meta, Facebook’s parent company, announced plans to lay off about 10,000 employees, or about 13% of its workforce, in what its chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, called a “year of ‘efficiency “. It had already laid off 11,000 workers by the end of last year.

At Amazon last year, initial layoffs affected employees working on voice assistant and Alexa devices, then spread to other divisions, including teams working on automated store plans, drones and the company’s retail business. Human resources employees, especially recruiters, have also been affected.

In the most recent quarter, which ended in December, Amazon posted virtually no profit, in part due to unexpected weakness in its cloud computing business.

The new cuts will also affect Twitch, the live-streaming site Amazon bought in 2014, and human resources groups, Jassy’s memo said.

Amazon’s stock price was down more than 2% at midday Monday.

Mr Jassy said management had not yet determined which workers would be made redundant, but expected to do so by mid-April. He said the company could still pursue “limited hiring” in strategic areas.