Synopsis: As it prepares for slower growth and a potential recession, Amazon.com Inc. plans to shed 10,000 workers, the biggest ever at the e-commerce giant.
After years of rapid expansion, Amazon’s Devices and Services division, which produces Alexa and consumer goods, is particularly susceptible to shrinking.
Amazon plans to lay off 10,000 workers, the most ever for an e-commerce behemoth.
As it gets ready for slower growth and a potential recession, Amazon.com Inc. plans to lay off 10,000 employees, the biggest ever at the e-commerce giant. People with knowledge of the matter said that the layoffs will likely affect Amazon’s retail divisions, human resources, and devices group, which is in charge of the Alexa digital assistant and Echo smart speakers.
Teams are choosing where to reduce employment as part of the company’s yearly planning process, according to the sources, who asked for anonymity to discuss a private topic.
The layoffs at Amazon would affect less than 1% of its more than 1.5 million employees worldwide and about 3% of its corporate staff. Miles Fortune is to thank for The New York Times.
Andy Jassy, CEO, has vowed to reduce operations in the face of sluggish sales growth and uncertain economic conditions. The Seattle-based corporation forecast last month that the holiday season would be the slowest in its history, setting off a panic on Wall Street and sending the stock tumbling.
Speaking anonymously to address a company issue, some long-term Amazon employees claimed that the most drastic cost-cutting they had ever witnessed had occurred recently.
The stock was down around 1.4% in New York. The New York Times broke the news of the anticipated layoffs.
The largest online retailer in the world has spent the majority of this year adjusting to a dramatic slowdown in e-commerce growth as customers went back to their pre-pandemic routines. Before expanding the hiring embargo to the rest of the company, Amazon postponed the launch of new warehouses and halted hiring in its retail segment. Jassy has shifted his focus in recent weeks to looking for cost-cutting options among experimental and unsuccessful enterprises. The business suspended teams working on a delivery robot, a telemedicine service, and a kid-friendly video conferencing device, among other initiatives.
The tech industry employed 1.54 million individuals as of the end of September, the great majority of whom were hourly workers who packed and transported goods in warehouses or worked in Whole Foods Market and other retail establishments. Seattle, a developing campus in the Washington, D.C., area, the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, Austin, Texas, and Boston are where most of its corporate employees are located.
Amazon’s Devices and Services division, which makes consumer gadgets and Alexa after years of rapid expansion, is particularly susceptible to layoffs. Although the company’s voice-activated gadgets have seen good sales, they haven’t developed into the indispensable shopping gateway that its designers had envisioned. People routinely store smart speakers in their closets.
Amazon is focusing on its devices while continuing its layoffs.
Amazon fired hundreds of workers in order to survive the dotcom bust in the early 2000s. Since then, in an effort to reduce organisational fat, the corporation has experienced periods of primarily self-imposed austerity, occasionally pausing hiring for extended periods of time for huge teams.
In recent months, Amazon has also discontinued or curtailed a number of projects, including Fabric.com, a division that had sold sewing supplies for three decades, Scout, a cooler-sized home delivery robot, and Amazon Care, a service that offered primary and urgent healthcare but did not draw enough customers.
It decreased its employment by approximately 80,000 individuals between April and September, mostly as a result of significant hourly employee attrition.
Amazon stopped hiring in a number of its smaller units in September. In October, it ceased hiring for the more over 10,000 available positions in its primary retail division. It stopped corporate hiring for the upcoming few months throughout the whole company two weeks ago, including its cloud computing section.
Not just Amazon, but the majority of the world’s largest internet companies have chosen to freeze new hires and lay off employees. Parent company of Facebook, Meta, said that it would let rid of approximately 11,000 workers. More technological businesses are likely to follow suit as the global economy slips into recession as a result of unrestrained inflation and interest rate increases by central banks throughout the globe. Here, we’ve compiled some of the largest IT industry layoffs and hiring freezes.