Amazon has announced a further 9,000 jobs are to be cut from its global workforce – taking it to a total of 27,000 job losses announced so far this year.
The retail, marketplace and technology business says the new job losses will mostly come from the AWS web services business, its people, experience and technology (PXT), advertising, and Twitch gaming divisions.
When Amazon announced 18,000 job losses in January, it said it would be refocusing on what matters to customers at a time of economic uncertainty. The bulk of January’s cuts fell on its PXT division and its stores business.
Today Amazon chief executive Andy Jassy says in a letter to staff that the additional cuts follow the completion of internal planning. While the business expanded quickly in recent years, it was now choosing to be more streamlined in costs and headcount in an uncertain economy. He says: “If I go back to our tenet – being leaner while doing so in a way that enables us to still invest robustly in the key long-term customer experiences that we believe can meaningfully improve customers’ lives and Amazon as a whole – I believe the result of this year’s planning cycle is a plan that accomplishes this objective.”
Amazon has taken on thousands of new staff in recent years in response to fast-growing customer demand grew. In the UK, it hired around 10,000 staff in both 2020 and 2021 as it looked to meet strong online demand during pandemic trading restrictions and in anticipation of economic expansion as lockdowns came to an end. By September 2021, when it held a careers day aimed at hiring 2,500 people in the UK, it employed 55,000 in the market.
The job cuts come as a number of tech companies have together laid off thousands of staff in recent months, including at Facebook parent company Meta, Google parent Alphabet, and Microsoft. CNBC puts the total at more than 104,000 over the last year.
Amazon is an Elite retailer in RXUK Top500 research.
