This is more than the 10,000 announced in November by the American distribution giant.
Job cuts at Amazon will affect more than 18,000 employees, more than previously estimated, the group admitted on Wednesday January 4 after the revelations of the Wall Street Journal, which evoked 17,000 departures. In a message on the group’s website, general manager Andy Jassy indicates that the group “plans to cut just over 18,000 jobs”, including in Europe. This job cut plan is the largest among recent announcements of workforce reductions affecting the technology sector in the United States. It is also the most massive staff reduction in the Seattle company’s history.
Amazon had already announced in November the plan to cut 10,000 jobs and started to do so. At the end of September, the group had 1.54 million employees worldwide, not including seasonal workers recruited during periods of increased activity, particularly during the holiday season. Contacted Wednesday by AFP, Amazon did not respond immediately.
Amazon has been hiring with a vengeance during the pandemic to meet the explosion in demand, doubling its global staff between early 2020 and early 2022. But the company saw its net profit drop 9% year on year in the third quarter. And for the last quarter, Amazon anticipated anemic growth by its standards, between 2% and 8% over one year, and an operating profit of between 0 and 4 billion dollars, against 3.5 for the same period of 2021. The group will announce its annual results on February 1.
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8,000 layoffs at Salesforce
In the Tech sector, the major platforms with an advertising-based business model are facing budget cuts from advertisers, who are reducing their expenses in the face of inflation and rising interest rates. Meta, the parent company of Facebook, announced in November the loss of 11,000 jobs, or about 13% of its workforce. At the end of August, Snapchat cut around 20% of its workforce, or more than 1,200 employees. Twitterbought in October by Elon Musk, for its part fired about half of its 7,500 employees.
The latest, the American IT group Salesforce, specializing in management solutions and in the cloud (remote computing), announced on Wednesday that it was laying off around 10% of its employees, or just under 8,000 jobs.