Amazon plans to lay off 9,000 corporate and tech workers by the end of April, adding to the 18,000 positions it already cut late last year and this January, Andy Jassy, the company’s chief executive, saying in a note to employees Monday.
The new layoffs, which represent less than 3 percent of its corporate workforce, will target workers in some of Amazon’s most profitable divisions that had previously been spared, including the cloud computing business and Amazon’s advertising operations. Amazon. Those two segments of the business are much higher-margin operations than Amazon’s core retail business, according to financial analysts and filings.
Mr. Jassy wrote that the annual planning session that company leaders wrapped up last week focused on optimizing costs and headcount.
“The overriding tenet of our annual planning this year was to be more efficient and to do it in a way that allows us to continue to invest robustly in the key long-term customer experiences that we believe can significantly improve the lives of customers and customers. Amazon generally. ” he wrote.
For more than a year, Jassy has been looking for cost cuts at Amazon. The company was quick to add employees during the pandemic and prioritized a few projects that lacked obvious ways to become profitable. She pulled back on expanding the company’s warehousing operations and halted work on the larger phase of Amazon’s planned second headquarters near Washington, DC.
Layoffs at Big Tech
After a wave of hiring from the pandemic, several tech companies are now pulling out.
- a growing list: Alphabet, Microsoft, Zoom and Meta are among the tech giants that have cut jobs amid concerns about an economic slowdown.
- Sales force: The company said it would lay off 10 percent of its staff, a move that appeared to run counter to co-founder and chief executive Marc Benioff’s stated commitment to his workers.
- New parents hit hard: At tech companies that have expanded paid parental leave in recent years, parents have felt the lash of mass layoffs especially viscerally.
- Technology generation gap: Recent cuts have been eye opening for young workers. But for older employees who experienced the dotcom crash, it hasn’t come as a surprise.
The company froze hiring last fall and had plans to lay off about 10,000 employees by November, a goal it expanded to 18,000 in early January.
Amazon had about 380,000 corporate employees at the end of 2022, according to a person familiar with its workforce.
Most of Amazon’s roughly 1.5 million employees are hourly workers who power its warehouse operations.
The tech industry is experiencing its biggest contraction since the dotcom crash in the early 2000s. Almost every big 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 percent of its workforce, part of what its chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, called an “efficiency year.” . It had already laid off 11,000 workers at the end of last year.
At Amazon, initial layoffs last year affected employees working on the voice assistant and Alexa devices, then spread to other divisions, including teams working on plans for automated stores, drones and the retail business of wider consumption of the company. Human resources employees, particularly recruiters, were also affected.
In the most recent quarter, which ended in December, Amazon reported almost no profit, due in part to unexpected weakness in its cloud computing business.
Twitch, the streaming site popular with gamers that Amazon bought in 2014, said it was laying off more than 400 people, about 22 percent of its total staff. In the uncertain economy, “user and revenue growth has not kept pace with our expectations,” Dan Clancy, Twitch’s chief executive, said in a blog post. Mr. Clancy took over as CEO from former Twitch leader Emmett Shear last week.
Amazon’s share price was down just over 1 percent at the close of trading on Monday.
Mr. Jassy said management had not yet determined the workers who would be laid off, but expected to do so in mid-to-late April. He said the company may still seek some “limited hiring” in strategic areas.
kellen browning contributed reporting from San Francisco.
