Amazon Will Lay Off 9,000 More Employees
Amazon plans to lay off another 9,000 employees over the next few weeks, CEO Andrew Jassy said Monday.
This is in addition to the planned layoff of 18,000 employees that the ecommerce giant announced in January. This round of cuts will largely impact workers in Amazon’s advertising department, on its video live streaming service Twitch, and on the Amazon Web Services and People Experience and Technology Solutions teams.
More from The Hollywood Reporter
'Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power' Casts Ciaran Hinds in Season 2
'Swarm' Boss Janine Nabers Peels Back the Layers of True Crime-Inspired Series and Its Antihero
“For several years leading up to this one, most of our businesses added a significant amount of headcount. This made sense given what was happening in our businesses and the economy as a whole. However, 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,” Jassy wrote in a note to employees Monday.
The previous round of layoffs primarily impacted staffers in the Amazon stores and the People Experience and Technology divisions.
Both rounds of cuts were made as company leaders worked with teams across the company and looked at “prioritizing what matters most to customers and the long-term health of our businesses,” Jassy wrote.
Amazon did not announce these new reductions with the January layoffs because the teams were not yet done conducting their analyses of the company, Jassy wrote. The exact roles to be eliminated as part of this layoff round still have not been decided, but Amazon hopes to complete that by mid to late April. Employees will receive severance as well as transitional health insurance benefits.
In Amazon’s most recent earnings report, covering the three months ended Dec. 31, the company beat Wall Street expectations, even as its earnings were below what it made a year earlier. Still, the company saw a surge in advertising revenue, hitting $11.6 billion over the holiday season, which was up 23 percent from a year earlier. Most of its advertising is related to its ecommerce business, rather than its streaming content.
Jassy said Amazon’s “overriding tenet” for annual planning this year is “to be leaner.” This follows in the footsteps of Facebook, which also recently announced a second round of layoffs, as part of CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s “Year of Efficiency.”
