Posted on 03/20/23
| News Source: WSJ
Amazon.com Inc. AMZN -1.49%decrease; red down pointing triangle said it was cutting 9,000 more jobs, following previously announced layoffs.
“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,” said CEO Andy Jassy in a statement Monday.
The company previously said it was slashing 18,000 positions.
Waves of job cuts have roiled the tech industry. Amazon is the latest company to enact more job cuts than previously expected. Last week, Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc. said it would cut roughly 10,000 jobs over the coming months, its second wave of mass layoffs.
Amazon invested heavily in expanding its head count during the early part of the Covid-19 pandemic as people shifted much of their shopping online. It added hundreds of thousands of workers. When demand began to fall off as consumers returned to bricks-and-mortar stores, Amazon cut back in areas of the business that were unprofitable and froze hiring.
Mr. Jassy said the 9,000 additional job cuts weren’t announced earlier because some teams hadn’t completed assessments that determined which positions needed to be eliminated.
Since 2022, layoff tallies at tech companies have reached about 300,000 workers, according to Layoffs.fyi, a site tracking job cuts in the industry.