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Amazon will lay off 9,000 workers in the upcoming weeks, according to CEO Andy Jassy, who relayed the news of the eliminated jobs in a memo to employees on Monday.
This follows 18,000 layoffs that Amazon announced in January.
“For several years leading up to this one, most of our businesses added a significant amount of headcount,” Jassy explained in the memo. “This made sense given what was happening in our businesses and the economy as a whole. However, 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.”
The new layoffs are focused in AWS, advertising, Twitch, and People Experience and Technology Solutions divisions.
“Some may ask why we didn’t announce these role reductions with the ones we announced a couple months ago,” Jassy wrote. “The short answer is that not all of the teams were done with their analyses in the late fall; and rather than rush through these assessments without the appropriate diligence, we chose to share these decisions as we’ve made them so people had the information as soon as possible.”
He added that as Amazon’s internal businesses evaluated what customers most care about, they made decisions that sometimes led to role reductions, sometimes led to moving people from one initiative to another, and sometimes led to new openings where the company didn’t have the right skills match from existing team members. This all factored into the layoffs.
“The overriding tenet of our annual planning this year was to be leaner while doing so in a way that enables us to still invest robustly in the key long-term customer experiences that we believe can meaningfully improve customers’ lives and Amazon as a whole,” Jassy wrote.
Amazon currently has a headcount of about 1.5 million employees according to the company.
Requests for comment from Amazon were not immediately returned.
Keith Loria can be reached at Kloria@commercialobserver.com.
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