Amazon will cut an additional 9,000 positions. The new cut comes on top of the 18,000 job cuts already announced in January, its chief executive, Andy Jassy, said on Monday in a letter to the group’s teams, published on its site.
This is a new episode of the ongoing slimming cure in the technology sector. 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 , as well as the platform Twitch video, Andy Jassy clarified.
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A drop in profit
The layoffs announced since early January represent around 1.7% of the workforce at Amazon, which had 1.54 million employees worldwide at the end of 2022. Andy Jassy justified this second wave of job cuts by the fact that the analyzes carried out in some departments had taken longer than for others, but it is part of the same cost-savings initiative 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 chief executive, who took over from founder Jeff Bezos in July 2021. The giant of Seattle (western United States) recorded a 98% drop in net profit in the fourth quarter of 2022, which came out well below what analysts had expected.
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“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. 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%.
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. Added to this was the US central bank’s (Fed) monetary tightening cycle, which began in the spring of 2022, which caused interest rates to rise sharply, to which the technology sector is particularly sensitive due to the significant financing needs. .
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