The year 2022 will have been placed under the sign of great difficulties for technology companies in the United States. The giant Amazon is no exception. In a message on the group’s website, Amazon chief executive Andy Jassy said that Amazon, which had already announced some 10,000 job cuts in November, has revised its estimate upwards and plans to cut “a little over 18,000 positions.
And, the management of the company will quickly implement this measure. Without indicating the distribution of these job cuts, the management announces that the employees affected “or their representatives, if necessary, in Europe” will be contacted by the company on January 18.
1.54 million employees worldwide
“Reviewing our annual planning has been more challenging this year given the economic uncertainty and the fact that we have been hiring heavily over the past few years,” Amazon adds. Since the start of the Covid pandemic, the online distribution giant has doubled its workforce between 2020 and 2022.
In total, the group had 1.54 million employees worldwide at the end of September, not including seasonal workers recruited during periods of increased activity, particularly during the holiday season.
However, the group’s boss wants to be reassuring: “Amazon has withstood uncertain and difficult economies in the past, and we will continue to do so”. He believes that these “changes will help us pursue our long-term opportunities with a stronger cost structure. Businesses that last for a long time go through different phases. They are not in massive staff expansion mode every year”.
All tech companies hard hit
Still, this job cuts plan is the most important among recent announcements of workforce reductions affecting the technology sector in the United States. It is also the most massive staff reduction in the Seattle company’s history.
It must be said that these results are not flourishing. Amazon saw its net profit drop 9% year on year in the third quarter. And for the last quarter, Amazon in November anticipated weak growth of between 2% and 8% year on year, and operating profit of between 0 and 4 billion dollars, compared to 3.5 for the same period of 2021.
This announcement also comes before the publication of its annual results on February 1 and should be able to reassure investors.
Amazon is not the only one affected by the cuts in the advertising budgets of its advertisers. Meta, the parent company of Facebook, announced in November the loss of 11,000 jobs, or about 13% of its workforce. By the end of August, Snapchat had cut about 20% of its workforce, or more than 1,200 employees. The latest, Twitter, bought in October by Elon Musk, for its part fired about half of its 7,500 employees.