Amazon plans to lay off 9,000 corporate and tech workers by the end of April, adding to the 18,000 roles it already cut late last year and this January, Andy Jassy, the company’s chief executive, said in a note to employees on Monday.
The new layoffs, which amount to roughly 3 percent of its corporate work force, will target workers in some of Amazon’s most profitable divisions, which had previously been spared, including Amazon’s cloud computing business and its advertising operations. Those two segments of the business are much higher-margin operations than Amazon’s core retail business, according to financial analysts and filings.
Mr. Jassy wrote that the company wrapped up its annual planning session last week, where the company focused on streamlining costs and head count.
“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,” he wrote.
For more than a year, Mr. Jassy has been pursuing cost cuts at Amazon. The company rapidly added employees during the pandemic and prioritized some projects that lacked obvious ways to become profitable. He has pulled back on expansion of the company’s warehouse operations, and paused work on the largest phase of the company’s planned second headquarters near Washington, D.C.
The company froze hiring last fall and by November had plans to lay off about 10,000 employees, a target that expanded to 18,000 in early January.
Amazon employed about 1.54 million employees at the end of last year, down 4 percent from a year earlier. But most of those employees are hourly workers who power its warehouse operations.
Twitch, the livestreaming site that Amazon owns, and human resources groups will also face layoffs.
Mr. Jassy said management had not yet determined which workers would be laid off yet, but it expected to do so by mid to late April. He said the company could still pursue some “limited hiring” in strategic areas.
This is a developing story. Check back for updates.
