Amazon plans to lay off 10000 employees
2022.11.16 13:58
Amazon plans to lay off 10000 employees
Budrigannews.com – Amazon.com Inc said on Wednesday it will continue to expand its devices, as a person familiar with the company said it is still targeting about 10,000 job cuts, including its retail and human resources division.
The announcement, the first at Amazon since media, including Reuters, reported a layoff plan on Monday, heralded a dramatic turnaround at the company, known for creating jobs, and shaped the latest layoffs to hit the tech sector.
Amazon executive Dave Limp said in a blog post that the company has decided to integrate the team into the device unit. He notified cut employees on Tuesday.
“We continue to face an abnormal and uncertain macroeconomic environment,” he said. “With this in mind, we have been working over the past few months to further prioritize what is most important to our customers and our business.”
The plan to eliminate about 10,000 roles through further unit reductions would equate to a reduction of about 300,000 percent of Amazon’s nearly 3 percent corporate workforce.
For years, it was unclear how online retailers would accept it for a more complex task than checking the news and weather, but its goal was to make Alexa, the voice assistant that powers the devices they sell, ubiquitous and present to them for shopping.
In a project inspired by the talking computers of the science fiction show “Star Trek”, Alexa has acquired a workforce that by 2019 has grown to 10,000.
At the time, Amazon was touting sales of more than 100 million Alexa devices, a figure that has not been publicly updated since. Founder Jeff Bezos later said that the company sells Alexa devices at discounted prices and sometimes often below cost.
While Amazon has struggled to code intelligent answers to questions Alexa might expect from users, OpenAI, backed by Alphabet’s Google and Microsoft Corp, had a breakthrough in chatbots that could respond like humans without hands.
Following the news of the layoffs, the shares posted losses and fell about 1 percent on Wednesday afternoon.
About Face
The news follows the announcement last week by Facebook’s parent, Meta Platforms Inc, that it eliminated 11,000 jobs in addition to layoffs at Twitter Inc, Microsoft and Snap Inc.
For Amazon, the reduction contrasts with efforts a few months ago to double its basic salary cap in order to compete more actively for talent.
On May 9 last year, he sold 55,000 corporate roles globally at job fairs, but only increased by hiring at Amazon logistics centers in a short period of time, the online bookstore that Bezos envisioned on road trips 30 years ago, with more than 150 million workers, including warehouse staff, making him the No. 2 private employer in the United States. It was a great experience.
The turn was sudden. Retailers are now responding to sales that could be up just 2% this holiday season, up from a 38% increase 2 years ago. Amazon’s chief financial officer told reporters last month that consumers were on a tighter budget in the face of inflation and high fuel costs.
The company’s profit engine, the cloud computing division, similarly increased revenue more slowly on a quarterly basis last year, at the time of currency adjustments.
Andy Jassy, who became CEO in 2021, has so far focused on cutting costs and blocking the 42% drop in Amazon’s share price.
Under his watch, Amazon announced the end of virtual medical services for employers and the pruning of its much-talked-about curbside autonomous delivery program. He also froze corporate recruitment.
