E-commerce giant Amazon has announced this week it will not be laying off 10,000 staff as first reported in November, but 18,000.
The cuts represent an 80 per cent increase on the forecast reported in the Wall Street Journal, amounting to about 1.2% of its worldwide workforce of around 1.5 million.
In a statement shared with Amazon employees this week, Andy Jassy, CEO at Amazon, confirmed the losses; he said: “Today, I wanted to share the outcome of these further reviews, which is the difficult decision to eliminate additional roles. Between the reductions we made in November and the ones we’re sharing today, we plan to eliminate just over 18,000 roles.”
The cuts will affect around 5% of the corporate workforce. About what divisions would be most affected, Jassy stated:
“Several teams are impacted; however, most role eliminations are in our Amazon Stores and PXT organisations.”
As shopper demand appears to have slowed while inflation rates have climbed steadily higher, Amazon is not the only tech firm to cut costs across divisions. Several big tech groups, including Salesforce, Meta and Microsoft, are tightening their belts and deepening their cost focus, reversing the hiring hike experienced during the pandemic. In turn, this aims to keep investors happy by steadying share prices.
Vimeo announced more this week after making two redundancies in six months. CEO Anjali Sud announced the video marketing platform is releasing 11 per cent of its estimated 1,400 staff from their contracts.
Meta cut 11,000 jobs in November, the first mass layoffs in its history, amounting to about 13 per cent of its 87,000-s, strong workforce; with the metaverse, division taking less of a hit the job losses will come mainly from Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.
Back in October, Microsoft also laid off 1,000 jobs due to ‘structural changes’, according to Office Today. In 2022, Twitter released 3,750 employees, while Snap (Snapchat) let go of 1,300 staff.
In the announcement to Amazon employees headed “Update from CEO Andy Jassy on role eliminations”, the CEO added: “S-team and I are deeply aware that these role eliminations are brutal for people, and we don’t take these decisions lightly or underestimate how much they might affect the lives of those who are impacted.
“We are working to support those affected and are providing packages that include a separation payment, transitional health insurance benefits, and external job placement support,” he added.
The Financial Times reported that the cuts came a day after Amazon took out an unsecured loan of $8bn from several lenders, with TD Securities heading the group, which will mature at the end of the year.
In January 2022, Amazon announced it was partnering with Cisco to test how collaboration technology could be used for communications in space. The tech was used as part of the Artemis I crewless mission that took part between 16 November 2022-11 December 2022 that circled the moon in NASA’s Orion spacecraft.
Many internet reports claim Amazon may have overextended itself, especially in its retail departments, with its web services doing most of the heavy lifting for the company. As Amazon sees $1trn disappear from its value, some investors are predicting the return of Jeff Bezos to take over the helm as CEO.
