Amazon announced another round of layoffs on Monday (March 20). The company will fire 9,000 more employees in the coming weeks. This comes after the e-commerce giant fired some 18,000 employees in January.
The announcement of the fresh round of layoffs was made by CEO Andy Jassy in a memo to the staff on Monday. “Given the uncertain economy… and the uncertainty that exists in the near future, we have chosen to be more streamlined in our costs and headcount,” said Jassy.
According to media reports, the new cuts will happen predominantly from Amazon’s advertising units, Twitch livestreaming businesses, Amazon Web Services, cloud computing, PTX (people, experiences and tech), and human resources.
The Amazon CEO noted that the company had hired a substantial number of staff in the past few years. However, given the recent economic uncertainty, it has been forced to cut costs and fire employees.
“Some may ask why we didn’t announce these role reductions with the ones we announced a couple months ago”, said Jassy, in the memo. “The short answer is that not all of the teams were done with their analyses in the late fall; and rather than rush through these assessments without the appropriate diligence, we chose to share these decisions as we’ve made them so people had the information as soon as possible.”
Notably, the announcement was made following the second phase of the company’s annual budget process which was completed earlier this month. The layoffs also come amid reports of Facebook parent company Meta’s second round of job cuts, suggesting that more layoffs from other tech giants may be on the horizon.
“The overriding tenet of our annual planning this year was to be leaner while doing so in a way that enables us to still invest robustly in the key long-term customer experiences that we believe can meaningfully improve customers’ lives and Amazon as a whole”, said Jassy, as per CNBC.
(With inputs from agencies)
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