Amazon is planning to cut over 18,000 jobs in an attempt to reshape its business while at least two other major tech companies announced job cuts as well amid an “uncertain economy”.
The e-commerce giant has increased the number of layoffs from the earlier expected 10,000 job cuts across the tech giant’s devices organisation, retail division and human resources, marking the largest set of layoffs in its history.
“This year’s review has been more difficult given the uncertain economy and that we’ve hired rapidly over the last several years,” Mr Jassy said in a note to employees.
“Today, I wanted to share the outcome of these further reviews, which is the difficult decision to eliminate additional roles. Between the reductions we made in November and the ones we’re sharing today, we plan to eliminate just over 18,000 roles,” Mr Jassy added.
While several teams at the company would be impacted, he said the majority of job cuts are in Amazon Stores that include roles at Amazon Fresh and Amazon Go, as well as at the tech giant’s PXT organisations that handle its human resources and other functions.
The layoffs, while slashing nearly thousands more roles than previously anticipated, represent a fraction of the tech giant’s 1.5 million global workforce.
“Amazon has weathered uncertain and difficult economies in the past, and we will continue to do so,” Mr Jassy said, adding that the new changes would help the company pursue its “long-term opportunities with a stronger cost structure”.
The tech giant had already initiated a hiring freeze last year amid massive layoffs at other Big Tech organisations, including Twitter, Facebook parent company Meta and other Silicon Valley firms.
According to the website layoffs.fyi, which tracks job cuts in the tech industry, over 150,000 employees were laid off last year.
Entering 2023, Salesforce and Vimeo also announced they were laying off employees.
Salesforce said it will cut about 10 per cent of its workforce – representing about 8,000 jobs – apart from closing some of its offices, while Vimeo said it would reduce staff numbers by 11 per cent.
Staff at Salesforce who are expected to lose their jobs will reportedly receive about five months of pay, health insurance, career resources and other benefits.
“As our revenue accelerated through the pandemic, we hired too many people leading into this economic downturn we’re now facing, and I take responsibility for that,” the founder of the San Francisco-based company Marc Benioff said.
Vimeo’s chief also cited an uncertain economy for the layoffs in her message to employees.
“This was a very hard decision that impacts each of us deeply. It is also the right thing to do to enable Vimeo to be a more focused and successful company, operating with the necessary discipline in an uncertain economic environment,” Anjali Sud, chief of the video hosting platform, said on Wednesday.
