Amazon to lose 9,000 more employees in latest round of layoffs
AWS, advertising and HR divisions are set to be hit by upcoming job cuts
Amazon will let go of 9,000 more employees to streamline its operations and cope with economic uncertainty.
On Monday, CEO Andy Jassy announced that the new job cuts would be taking place within the coming weeks.
"This was a difficult decision, but one that we think is best for the company long term," Jassy said.
This will be the second-largest round of layoffs in Amazon's history, the 9,000 redundancies adding to the 18,000 announced in January.
The latest round of cuts will affect even the profitable areas of Amazon, including its cloud computing unit AWS and its growing advertising business.
Twitch, the gaming platform owned by Amazon, will also experience some job cuts, as will Amazon's PXT division, which handles human resources and other functions.
PXT, which comprises Amazon's ecommerce business, brick-and-mortar stores like Amazon Fresh and Amazon Go, and departments like the one responsible for virtual assistant Alexa, was affected by the company's past layoffs.
Jassy explained that the decision to implement more job cuts was a result of ongoing analysis of priorities and economic uncertainty.
"Some may ask why we didn't announce these role reductions with the ones we announced a couple months ago," he wrote, adding that not all teams had completed their analyses in the late fall.
He further stated that given the unpredictable economic conditions, Amazon has decided "to be more streamlined in our costs and headcount."
Jassy said the teams affected by the upcoming job cuts have not yet finalised their decisions on which roles will be impacted, and Amazon expects this process to conclude by mid-to-late April.
The CEO of Twitch, Dan Clancy, stated that approximately 400 individuals from his team will be let go as part of the company's latest round of layoffs.
Clancy attributed the decision to slower-than-expected user and revenue growth at Twitch and the economic downturn.
Amazon says it will extend support to the affected employees, including separation payment, transitional health insurance benefits and external job placement assistance.
The company spent $640 million on severance packages for the cuts that occurred in December and January.
The decision to implement further job cuts follows a trend in the tech sector that has witnessed numerous valuable companies sever ties with large numbers of employees.
Amazon's workforce, which includes employees in both warehouses and offices, increased to over 1.6 million people during the pandemic.
However, as the pandemic situation improved, the demand for its services slowed. As a result, Amazon halted or cancelled its warehouse expansion plans last year.
Last month, Amazon said its operating profit may continue to decline in the current quarter due to the financial repercussions of consumer and cloud customers curtailing their spending.
Despite aiming to operate more efficiently this year through job cuts, Jassy said he remains hopeful about the prospects of the company's largest businesses, retail and AWS, as well as new divisions that warrant continued investment.