That’s 27,000 in total. Amazon will cut 9,000 additional jobs, which will be added to the 18,000 job cuts already announced in January, its general manager, Andy Jassy, said on Monday in a letter to the group’s teams, published on its site. Most of these new job cuts concern the remote computing activity (cloud) Amazon Web Services (AWS), the PXT department dedicated to human resources management, the staff dedicated to advertising, as well as the platform Twitch video, Andy Jassy clarified.
The Director General justified this second wave of job cuts by the fact that the analyzes carried out in certain departments had taken longer than for others, but it is part of the same cost-cutting process initiated in the fall. . “Given the economic uncertainty and the lack of visibility on the near future, we have decided to reduce our costs and our workforce”, explained the successor of Jeff Bezos in July 2021.
Between the end of 2019 and the end of 2022, Amazon recruited, net, 700,000 people, and thus increased the number of its employees by 83%. “For several years”, before 2023, “most of our activities increased their workforce significantly”, which “made sense (at the time) given the evolution of our business and the economy” , recalled Andy Jassy on Monday.
The end of the confinements and the gradual return to the office slowed down the trajectory of the group, which had experienced insolent growth with the Covid-19 pandemic and the acceleration of online commerce. To this was added the cycle of monetary tightening by the American central bank (Fed), which began in the spring of 2022, which caused a sharp rise in interest rates, to which the technology sector is particularly sensitive due to the significant financing needs. .
The layoffs announced since early January represent about 1.7% of the workforce at Amazon, which had 1.54 million employees worldwide at the end of 2022.