Amazon will cut another 9,000 jobs on top of the 18,000 it announced in January, CEO Andy Jassi said in a letter sent to teams and posted on the North American group’s “website”.
This is a new episode in the job cuts that are taking place in the technology sector.
The jobs that will be eliminated will have a significant impact on the remote computing (cloud) activities of Amazon Web Services (AWS), the division responsible for managing human resources, advertising staff and the Twitch video platform, Yassi explained.
Layoffs announced since the beginning of the year (27,000 in total) account for about 1.7% of Amazon’s workers, who had 1.54 million employees worldwide at the end of 2022.
Andy Jassi blamed the second wave of job cuts on the fact that the analysis is taking longer in some departments but is part of the same cost-cutting initiative that began in the fall.
“Given the economic uncertainty and the lack of information about the near future, we have decided to cut our costs and our workforce,” said Yassy, who replaced group founder Jeff Bezos in July 2021.
In the fourth quarter of 2022, the group recorded a 98% drop in net income.
From the end of 2019 to the end of 2022, Amazon hired 700,000 people, increasing the number of employees by 83%.
The end of the lockdown has slowed the trajectory of the group, which has grown strongly with the acceleration of “online trading” during the covid-19 pandemic.
The monetary tightening cycle launched a year ago by the US central bank, which raised interest rates sharply, has also affected the tech sector due to significant funding needs.