A rather annoyed sounding Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has announced that around 18,000 Amazonians will be laid off by the company with impacted employees being notified around the 18th of January. The reason for the annoyance (and the announcement) is that a ‘teammate’ leaked the information externally and he wanted to speak directly to employees rather than have them left reading the news in the press.
We typically wait to communicate about these outcomes until we can speak with the people who are directly impacted. However, because one of our teammates leaked this information externally, we decided it was better to share this news earlier so you can hear the details directly from me.
– Andy Jassy, CEO, Amazon
Devices and Books we already knew would see teams trimmed – Amazon doesn’t really make any money from Kindles, Echos and the like. However the majority of Amazonians that will sadly lose their jobs work in the Amazon Stores and PXT (People, Experience, and Technology) organisations.
Even the might Amazon has been impacted by worldwide economic factors following the mass return to work after the pandemic. It’s likely that their next quarterly earnings report will reflect the economic slowdown and the forecast for 2023 will not be quite as optimistic as we’ve come to expect leading to the company examining their cost structure and eliminating roles that don’t directly contribute to the bottom line or future growth.
These changes will help us pursue our long-term opportunities with a stronger cost structure; however, I’m also optimistic that we’ll be inventive, resourceful, and scrappy in this time when we’re not hiring expansively and eliminating some roles. Companies that last a long time go through different phases. They’re not in heavy people expansion mode every year.
– Andy Jassy, CEO, Amazon
There are about 1.5 million Amazonians around the world, with large numbers working in fulfilment and logistics parts of the business. 18,000 layoffs represents about 1.2% of the workforce. There was no confirmation as to which countries the majority of the cuts would be made, but it is confirmed that some of the job losses would be in Europe.
