Amazon will cut an additional 9,000 jobs, on top of the 18,000 it had announced in January, its CEO Andy Jassy said in a letter sent to the teams and posted on the US group’s website.
This is a new episode in the reduction of jobs that is taking place in the technology sector.
The jobs to be eliminated essentially affect remote computing activity (cloud) Amazon Web Services (AWS), the department dedicated to managing human resources, employees who work in advertising and on the Twitch video platform, Jassy explained.
The layoffs announced since the beginning of the year (27,000 in total) represent about 1.7% of Amazon workers, which had 1.54 million employees worldwide at the end of 2022.
Andy Jassy blamed this second wave of job cuts on the fact that analysis takes longer in some departments, but is part of the same cost-cutting initiative that began in the fall.
“Given the economic uncertainty and lack of visibility about the near future, we decided to reduce our costs and our workforce,” said Jassy, who succeeded the group’s founder, Jeff Bezos, in July 2021.
In the fourth quarter of 2022, the group posted a 98% drop in its net profit.
From the end of 2019 to the end of 2022, Amazon recruited 700,000 people, increasing the number of employees by 83%.
The end of the confinements slowed down the trajectory of the group, which had grown a lot with the acceleration of trade online during the Covid-19 pandemic.
The monetary tightening cycle started a year ago by the US central bank, which sharply raised interest rates, has also affected the technology sector due to significant financing needs.
Source: TSF
