The biggest wave of Amazon layoffs in the company’s history will reportedly commence this week.
Around 10,000 people in the company’s devices organization, retail division and human resources department are looking at a potential job loss, the New York Times reported, citing a source with ties to the eCommerce giant.
Amazon announced it plans to cut about 3% of its workforce in technology and corporate positions, totaling nearly 10,000 employees. While the company provided no exact figures, it’s possible that even more people will be out of jobs given Amazon’s attempts to reinforce its cost structure.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy revealed this plan during the company's Q3 earnings report in October, stating that Amazon has “a set of initiatives that we’re methodically working through that we believe will yield a stronger cost structure for the business moving forward.”
Much like other major brands such as Meta, Twitter and Snap, Amazon cited worsening macroeconomic conditions on a global scale leading to decreased buying power of its customers as the reason for its effort to be "more streamlined,"
“There is obviously a lot happening in the macroeconomic environment, and we’ll balance our investments to be more streamlined without compromising our key long-term, strategic bets,” Jassy added.
The company's decision to rapidly expand following the pandemic before hitting its slowest growth in two decades this year is another possible reason for the layoffs.
Amazon is expecting its Q4 2022 revenue growth to slow down to just between 2% and 8% compared to Q4 2021.
Two weeks ago, Amazon stopped hiring for its AWS cloud computing division, an almost telltale sign of the layoffs to come.
While the upcoming layoffs represent just about 3% of the corporate headcount, it’s less than 1% of Amazon’s total employee base of more than 1.6 million at the end of 2021.
Amazon is also reportedly planning on hiring 150,000 full-time, part-time and seasonal employees across its US operations network to prepare for the 2022 “shopping surge.”