Amazon, the world’s largest e-commerce company, has decided to make another large-scale job cut in two months. Following the Facebook parent company Meta Platform (Meta), which announced an additional 10,000 job cuts last week, the wind for a ‘second restructuring’ of global big tech companies is strong.
According to the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) and others on the 20th (local time), Amazon CEO Andy Jassy issued a statement on the same day and announced that he would lay off another 9,000 jobs by next month. This is the second round of restructuring in two months, following 18,000 job cuts in January this year. “Given the current uncertain economic climate and uncertainty about the future, we have decided to cut staff and costs,” Jassy said in his statement. ”he said.
According to the New York Times (NYT), Amazon has 1.5 million employees worldwide as of December last year, and 380,000 of them are full-time employees. If Amazon’s first restructuring was focused on the retail sector, this job cut is expected to affect cloud services, advertisements, and live streaming service ‘Twitch’, which are its main businesses. Twitch, which was acquired by Amazon in 2014, announced on the 20th that it would lay off 400 people, about 22% of its total employees.
Amazon expanded its business rapidly, including hiring about 800,000 additional employees, growing further as online shopping scale expanded during the novel coronavirus infection (Corona 19) pandemic. However, last year’s performance was sluggish as the pandemic eased and fears of an economic recession grew due to the rapid interest rate hike by the US Federal Reserve. Earlier this month, it suspended its second headquarters project to be built in Virginia, and partially suspended the operation of Amazon Go, an unmanned convenience store operated in Seattle and New York.
The NYT diagnosed, “Most major tech companies are reducing their staff,” and “the biggest job cut fever is blowing since the ‘dot-com bubble’ collapsed in the early 2000s.” In the tech industry, which cut about 300,000 jobs last year, it is expected that the manpower reduction craze will continue.
Meta, which laid off 11,000 people, or 13% of its total employees, in November last year also announced on the 14th that it would cut an additional 10,000 people. At the same time, he said that there is no plan to fill about 5,000 vacancies. Microsoft announced layoffs of 10,000 people in January, equivalent to 5% of its total workforce. Google’s parent company Alphabet, which laid off 12,000 workers, or 6% of its total employees, in the same month is also expected to announce additional job cuts.
Source: Donga
Mark Jones is a world traveler and journalist for News Rebeat. With a curious mind and a love of adventure, Mark brings a unique perspective to the latest global events and provides in-depth and thought-provoking coverage of the world at large.