Amazon CEO Andrew Jassy announced on March 20 that the company would likely retrench another 9,000 employees. This is in addition to the 18,000 people that the e-commerce giant announced it would lay off in January.
The cuts will likely be in the advertising department, video streaming service, Twitch, Amazon Web Services and in the People Experience and Technology Solutions teams.
In a note to Amazon employees Jassy said, “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.”
The Amazon Purge?
Jassy said it was a matter of “prioritizing what matters most to customers and the long-term health of our businesses.” Exactly which roles will be eliminated is still unclear but employees will receive severance and transitional health insurance benefits.
Despite the fact that advertising revenue hit $11.6 billion in the holiday season which was 23% higher than a year earlier, the goal for the company is to be leaner in terms of staff.
With the latest round of job cuts, the company would have eliminated 27,000 positions in recent months.
“Some may ask why we didn’t announce these role reductions with the ones we announced a couple months ago. The short answer is that not all the teams were done with their analyses in the late fall; and rather than rush through these assessments without the appropriate diligence, we chose to share these decisions as we’ve made them so people had the information as soon as possible.”
In a separate memo to Amazon subsidiary Twitch on March 20, its CEO Dan Clancy confirmed that the live-streaming platform was letting go of some 400 employees.
“Like many companies, our business has been impacted by the current macroeconomic environment, and user and revenue growth has not kept pace with our expectations. In order to run our business sustainable, we’ve made the very difficult decision to shrink the size of our workforce.”
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