UNITED STATES: In a wave of job cuts thrashing the tech industry after Twitter and Meta, shopping platform Amazon reportedly plans to let go of 10,000 business and tech employees—or approximately 3% of its white-collar staff—as early as this week.
Amazon’s massive layoff of “corporate and technology” employees worldwide will focus on its ‘devices unit’, which houses Alexa, as well as retail and human resources, according to people with knowledge of the matter.
Amazon’s largest job cut in the company’s history comes after it recently announced it would freeze hiring for the corporate workforce for the next few months.
It’s the most recent post-pandemic labor rout in the tech sector. Twitter let go of almost 3,000 staff earlier this month. Last week, Meta fired more than 11,000 workers. Disney, Apple, and Google have all made plans to reduce spending or slow down hiring.
In its most recent quarterly results report, Amazon foresaw a disappointingly small holiday revenue boost and weak sales in Amazon Web Services. This contributed to a stock market crash that caused the corporation to lose $1 trillion in market value for the first time.
Brian Olsavsky, the business’s chief financial officer, stated last month during a conference call with reporters that the company had noticed indicators of tighter household shopping budgets and was still struggling with rising inflation and energy expenses. Since then, it has said that it will temporarily stop new corporate hiring.
In some recent years, Amazon’s devices division has declared an annual operating loss of more than $5 billion, according to media reports from last week.
When some consumers only use Alexa for a few tasks, business debate whether to concentrate on adding new features.
Less than 1% of Amazon’s total workforce, which stood at more than 1.5 million employees as of September 30, including warehouse and transportation roles, would be affected by the proposed layoffs.
This year, the value of Amazon’s stock has decreased by more than 40%. On Monday afternoon, they were down 1.1% at $99.67.
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