The layoffs announced by Amazon
Drastic weight loss cure for Amazon. The e-commerce giant will cut another 9,000 jobs, in addition to the 18,000 announced in January. Most of the new cuts are in “Amazon’s cloud business Web Services (Aws), the Pxt department dedicated to human resource management, the staff dedicated to advertising, as well as the Twitch video platform,” said CEO Andy Jassy.
The layoffs announced since early January represent about 1.7% of Amazon’s workforce, which had 1.54 million employees worldwide at the end of 2022. The CEO justified the layoffs on the grounds that the analyzes carried out in some departments had taken longer, but it is part of the same reorganization plan launched in the autumn to streamline the company. “Given the economic uncertainty and lack of visibility into the future, we have decided to reduce our costs and workforce,” explained the CEO, who succeeded founder Jeff Bezos in July 2021.
The Seattle giant reported a 98% decline in net income in the fourth quarter of 2022, well below what analysts expected. Between late 2019 and late 2022, Amazon hired, net, 700 thousand people, increasing the number of employees by 83%. The end of the lockdowns slowed down the activity of the group, which had experienced incredible growth with the pandemic and had seen an acceleration of online commerce.
Jassy’s words recall those of Mark Zuckerberg which, defining 2023 as the year of efficiency for Meta, announced two heavy rounds of personnel cuts, one by 11 and another by 10 thousand people. Amazon announced work has been suspended in recent weeks for the construction of its second headquarters, the one in Virginia not far from Washington, where it had promised to invest 2.5 billion dollars by 2030 in addition to creating 25,000 jobs.