By Daphne Howland
Amazon will eliminate 9,000 positions by the end of April, mostly at AWS, the cloud-services business that has been the company’s profit center, as well as in its Twitch gaming, advertising and PXT (“People Experience and Technology Solutions”) teams, CEO Andy Jassy said in a memo to staff made public Monday.
The layoffs come just a few weeks after the company announced more than 18,000 roles would be cut, many of them in retail. The affected teams are still working out which roles will be eliminated, with a goal to have final decisions made by mid to late April, per the memo. The company will undertake “limited hiring in some of our businesses in strategic areas where we’ve prioritized allocating more resources,” Jassy also said.
When Jassy first arrived two years ago, many analysts expected him to focus on targeted ways to grow Amazon, but to largely maintain the status quo established by founder Jeff Bezos. In recent months the e-commerce giant has joined other tech-oriented companies of all sizes in drastically reducing the workforce and focusing on profitability.
“If I go back to our tenet — being 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 — I believe the result of this year’s planning cycle is a plan that accomplishes this objective,” Jassy said on Monday.
Courtesy: HR Dive