In another push to reduce costs and trim workforce, Amazon announced Monday its plans to lay off another 9,000 employees, bringing its total job cuts to 27,000 since November.
CEO Andy Jassy told employees Monday the company had finished another round of its annual cost-cutting review and decided to eliminate more roles in the next few weeks. The job cuts will come mostly from Amazon Web Services, advertising, human resources and Twitch, the gaming division.
Amazon has not yet decided “precisely which roles will be impacted” as the teams continue to make final decisions, Jassy said. It hopes to communicate with impacted employees by mid to late April. The impact on Seattle-area workers wasn’t immediately clear.
“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 said.
Amazon, like many tech companies, says it faced economic pressures for most of last year, from inflation to supply chain shortages. Although Amazon remained optimistic about customer demand, it told investors last year that as customers considered cutting back on their spending – both on Amazon’s online marketplace and in Amazon’s cloud computing division – the tech and e-commerce giant also began looking at how to tighten its belt.
The company lost $2.7 billion in 2022, though it attributes much of that loss to its investment in electric vehicle startup Rivian.
Amazon’s “overriding tenet of our annual planning this year was to be leaner,” Jassy said, but to do so in a way that allowed the company to invest “robustly” in long-term customer experiences.
Amazon spent most of 2022 re-evaluating parts of its sprawling business, ranging from its decision to close its physical bookstores last March to announcing it would slow its expansion in brick and mortar grocery stores this February. It froze corporate hiring last November and began job cuts shortly after.
Since then, Amazon has maintained that the number of job cuts remains fluid as it evaluates its business, often team by team. But, initial estimates suggested the layoffs would impact about 10,000 people.
In January, Jassy said the job cuts would reach 18,000. Monday’s announcement brings the number to 27,000.
The layoffs have so far impacted 1,852 people in Seattle and 448 in Bellevue.
Amazon’s internal evaluation to focus on “what customers most care about,” has led the company to reduce roles, move people from one initiative to another and, in some cases, create new openings where it doesn’t feel it has the right skill set, Jassy said Monday. Amazon will continue “limited hiring” in areas where it has prioritized allocating more resources, he added.
Meanwhile, Amazon is gearing up to enforce a return to office mandate. Amazon will require employees to work from the office three days a week as of May 1.
After three years of experimenting with remote and hybrid work options, Jassy said at the time of that announcement, Amazon had observed that it’s easier to “learn, model, practice and strengthen our culture when we’re in office together most of the time and surrounded by our colleagues.”
