Amazon to cut more than 18,000 jobs to cut costs, CEO says

Ama­zon intends to cut more than 18,000 jobs to cut costs, said the pres­i­dent of the tech giant.

In addi­tion, the announce­ment was brought for­ward “because one of my team­mates leaked this infor­ma­tion to the out­side world.”

The job cuts this time are equiv­a­lent to about 6% of the com­pa­ny’s approx­i­mate­ly 300,000 employees.

Ama­zon is the lat­est big tech com­pa­ny to announce major lay­offs as the cost of liv­ing cri­sis puts cus­tomers on hold.

In a mes­sage to staff, Ama­zon CEO Andy Jassy said, “We are work­ing to help those impact­ed and will con­tin­ue to pro­vide sev­er­ance pay, tran­si­tion­al health insur­ance ben­e­fits and exter­nal job place­ments. We offer a pack­age that includes assistance.”

The move comes after the tech giant announced last year that it would cut jobs with­out spec­i­fy­ing how many employ­ees it would cut.

Jassy did not spec­i­fy where the affect­ed employ­ees were locat­ed, but said the com­pa­ny would be con­tact­ing orga­ni­za­tions rep­re­sent­ing employ­ees “at appro­pri­ate loca­tions in Europe.”

He also said that “the bulk of the job cuts” are in Ama­zon store oper­a­tions and the peo­ple, exper­tise and tech­ni­cal teams.

In Novem­ber, Ama­zon announced it would begin lay­offs to cut costs, but did­n’t give a fig­ure for how many jobs it would cut.

At the time, US media report­ed that the com­pa­ny would cut about 10,000 jobs.

The com­pa­ny has already frozen hir­ing, halt­ed some ware­house expan­sions, and warned of over-hir­ing dur­ing the pandemic.

It has also tak­en steps to halt projects such as per­son­al deliv­ery robots and shut down parts of its business.

In a memo, Jassy said Ama­zon’s restruc­tur­ing was “more dif­fi­cult giv­en the eco­nom­ic uncer­tain­ty, which has added jobs rapid­ly in recent years.”

“A long-last­ing com­pa­ny has many stages.