Amazon encourages employees to look for work elsewhere as it joins Twitter and Meta in making significant layoffs.
The e-commerce giant will cut the most jobs in its devices unit, which includes Alexa, the voice assistant, as well as its retail division and human resources. The internet giant Amazon appears to be the most recent to let go of workers from departments that did not make a profit this year, following Twitter and Meta.
The New York Times reported on Monday that Amazon plans to fire 10,000 employees working in business and technical positions, possibly as soon as this week, according to people familiar with the situation.
More than 1.6 million people worked for Amazon complete- and part-time as of December 31, 2017. It recently declared that corporate hiring would stop for the foreseeable future.
The announcement comes just after Amazon issued a warning about a growth slowdown for the crucial holiday season, when it generates the most sales, citing a decline in consumer and company spending as a result of higher prices.
According to a Thursday Wall Street Journal article, Amazon.com Inc. is assessing its underperforming divisions to save money, including the devices division, where Alexa, the voice assistant, is housed. This information caused its shares to increase by 11%.
Following a lengthy investigation, Amazon has advised some employees in underperforming units to search for work elsewhere inside the organization. Along with closing teams in sectors like robotics and retail, the business is also moving employees from some groups to other, more lucrative divisions.
Jamie Zhang, an AI software engineer at Amazon Robotics, revealed his departure from his robotics team in a LinkedIn post. ” My time working for Amazon Robotics AI for 1.5 years came to an abrupt end when our entire robotics team was fired,” wrote Zhang in a blog post.
I had a terrific time working with outstanding leaders and engineers, and I helped create large-scale distributed systems using AWS for our robotics CI/CD pipelines. Thank you for assisting me in improving as a software engineer. For the upcoming chapter, I’m looking for software engineering jobs both locally (in CO) and remotely (in the US). We welcome direct messages and referrals!
Naturally, we are now looking at methods to cut expenses and keeping in mind the macroenvironment, said Amazon spokesperson Brad Glasser. The business remains “optimistic about Alexa’s future,” according to Glasser, because it is still a sizable source of income and investment for Amazon.
To deal with an “unusual macro-economic climate,” an Amazon executive told Reuters on November 3 that the business will cease hiring its corporate personnel.
We expect to maintain this suspension for the coming few months and will continue to keep an eye on the market and the overall economy before making any necessary adjustments. The division’s senior vice president for people experience and technology at Amazon, Beth Galetti, blogged about this.
“Increasing inflation, stricter monetary regulations, and unimpressive profit reports, according to a Bloomberg article, contributed to a record selloff in the stock this year, making Amazon the first publicly traded corporation in history to lose a trillion dollars in market worth. The e-commerce and cloud company’s shares fell 4.3 per cent on Wednesday, bringing its market worth down to approximately $879 billion from a peak close of $1.88 trillion in July 2021.
The biggest online retailer in the world has spent this year adjusting to a sharp slowdown in e-commerce growth as consumers went back to their pre-pandemic buying habits. Due to slow sales, rising costs, and an increase in borrowing rates, its shares have dropped by nearly 50%. Bloomberg’s research shows that co-founder Jeff Bezos’ wealth has dropped from $109 billion to around $83 billion since the year started.
Amazon forecasted last month the slowest sales increase for a holiday quarter in the company’s history as consumers hold back on their spending in the face of economic uncertainties. As a result, for the first time since the tech stock rally that was prompted by the pandemic, its market capitalization dropped below $1 trillion.
According to GlobalData analyst Neil Saunders, Amazon no longer has the luxury of engaging in excessive experimentation or pursuing numerous unprofitable enterprises.
11,000 workers, or roughly 13% of the whole staff, were recently let go by Meta. As Twitter Inc.’s new owner, Elon Musk, shakes up the social networking sector and eliminates about half of its workforce, the company’s job cuts are drawing more attention. Even though Apple Inc. has outperformed most of its rivals this year, it is cutting spending. Less than 1,000 employees across several divisions were let go by Microsoft Corp. last month.
According to data from consulting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas cited by Bloomberg, the tech industry also lost 9,587 jobs in October, the highest monthly total since November 2020.
The report claims that over the past month, 33,843 people were let go from a variety of jobs at dozens of companies, an increase of unmistakably 13 per cent over the total number of job cuts announced by US-based employers the month before.
Edited by Prakriti Arora
