Amazon intends to lay off 9,000 more employees, on top of the 18,000 job cuts it previously announced, CEO Andy Jassy announced on Monday.
In January, Amazon announced a 18,000-person layoff, the largest in the Seattle company’s history. These additional 9,000 layoffs bring the total to 27,000 job cuts, about 8% of Amazon’s corporate workforce, which previously numbered around 350,000 people.
CEO Andy Jassy said the additional cuts weren’t announced sooner because some teams hadn’t finished their cost-cutting analysis.
According to his memo, these recent headcount reductions have followed a period where Amazon significantly grew its workforce. “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,”
Jassy added, Even with the additional cuts, Amazon will engage in “limited hiring” in “strategic areas where we’ve prioritized allocating more resources.”
However, The company has trimmed back and eliminated several products, services, and entire businesses over the past year to help trim expenses, including its Scout neighborhood delivery robots, its Amazon Care primary healthcare business, bricks-and-mortar Amazon bookstores, and others.
