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Big tech and e-commerce giant Amazon has announced another round of job cuts that could affect up to 9,000 employees. The new round of layoffs will bring the total role cuts in the Seattle, Washington-based company to 27,000.
CEO Andy Jassy says the company has finished another round of annual cost-cutting review and has decided to eliminate more roles in the next few weeks.
According to a Monday missive from Jassy, the job cuts will be mostly at Amazon Web Services, advertising, human resources and gaming division Twitch.
Amazon has not yet decided “precisely which roles will be impacted” as the teams continue to make final decisions, Jassy's note said. The company hopes to intimate the affected staff this month itself.
“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.”
This round of Amazon's job shedding comes amid the continuing downsizing and restructuring of tech companies, majorly in the Americas and Europe.
The company says it faced economic pressures for most of last year, from inflation to supply chain shortages. Amazon is still optimistic about customer demand although the restructuring may affect Amazon’s online marketplace and cloud computing division.
The company suffered a $2.7 billion loss in 2022 much of it to an investment in electric vehicle startup Rivian.
Amazon’s “overriding tenet of our annual planning this year was to be leaner,” Jassy said, but to do so in a way that allowed the company to invest “robustly” in long-term customer experiences.
Presenting the company's 2022 annual report, Jassy, who is also the company's president, had said about the cloud services that AWS achieved an annualized $85B revenue run rate although it was "still in the adoption curve, but at a juncture where it’s critical to stay focused on what matters most to customers over the long-haul." He hinted at short-term headwinds to AWS despite growing 29% year-over-year in 2022 on a $62B revenue base, including low risk appetite of companies in spending because of the challenging macroeconomic conditions.