Amazon to Slash Another 9,000 Jobs - Modern Distribution Management

Amazon to Slash Another 9,000 Jobs

The layoffs will occur within “the next few weeks,” according to Amazon CEO Andy Jassy.
Amazon office

In addition to the 18,000 employees it laid off between November and January, Amazon.com plans to cut 9,000 more jobs as it continues to slash spending in nearly all of its operations.

The layoffs will occur within “the next few weeks,” Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said in a memo to employees on March 20, detailing that the new round of cuts will primarily impact staff in advertising, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Twitch and the company’s People, Experience and Technology (PXT) organizations.

Jassy noted that Amazon had been hiring in mass for the past several years, which he said was necessary given what was happening in Amazon’s businesses at the time. After recent internal analyses, however, the company has re-prioritized “decisions that sometimes led to role reductions, sometimes led to moving people from one initiative to another, and sometimes led to new openings where we don’t have the right skills match from our existing team members,” the CEO said. “Given the uncertain economy in which we reside, and the uncertainty that exists in the near future, we have chosen to be more streamlined in our costs and headcount,” Jassy said.

Jassy added that the additional 9,000 layoffs weren’t announced alongside the initial 18,000 cuts because some teams hadn’t finished their analyses at that point.

The cuts at Amazon pile on to the recent slowdown in the technology and logistics industries amid cooling eCommerce demand. Logistics companies cut nearly 17,000 jobs last month, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Jassy noted that, despite the mass layoffs, Amazon may see “limited hiring in some of our businesses in strategic areas where we’ve prioritized allocating more resources,” and that he remains optimistic about Amazon’s two largest businesses, Stores and AWS.

“If I go back to our tenet — being 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 — I believe the result of this year’s planning cycle is a plan that accomplishes this objective,” he said. “I remain very optimistic about the future and the myriad of opportunities we have and our newer customer experiences and businesses in which we’re investing.”

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