Amazon To Cut 9,000 More Jobs, CEO Cites 'Uncertain Economy': Report

Amazon became the latest big technology company to announce a second round of layoffs on Monday.

Amazon announced a second round of layoffs on Monday

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Amazon announced on Monday that it would lay off 9,000 more employees, becoming the latest big technology company to announce a second round of layoffs, Reuters reported. The company had previously said it would slash 18,000 positions.

CEO Andy Jassy said the company had added substantial amount of staff in the past few years. The layoffs will be mainly from Amazon's cloud services, advertising and Twitch units.

"Given the uncertain economy in which we reside, and the uncertainty that exists in the near future, we have chosen to be more streamlined in our costs and headcount," said CEO Andy Jassy in a statement. 

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Jassy said the 9,000 additional job cuts weren't announced earlier because some teams hadn't completed assessments that determined which positions needed to be eliminated, a report in the Wall Street Journal said.

Last month, Amazon said its operating profit is likely to slump in the current quarter due to a hit by the financial impact of consumers and cloud customers clamping down on spending. Sales from its lucrative cloud-computing division slowed during the fourth quarter, Reuters reported.

Moreover, Amazon has scaled back or shut down entire services like its virtual primary care offering for employers.

"When considering the recent headlines that could accelerate the US' entry into a recession, at the minimum, and increase its severity, at the maximum, we are not surprised by Amazon's plans," DA Davidson analyst Tom Forte said in a note.

Shares of Amazon were down 1.6 per cent in morning trading on the Nasdaq.

In the initial years of Covid-19 pandemic, Amazon had invested heavily in increasing its head count as people shifted much of their shopping online.

The American company added hundreds of thousands of workers. However, as demand dipped with Covid cases waning and consumers returning to bricks-and-mortar stores, Amazon cut back in areas that were unprofitable and froze hiring.

The development comes as a spate of job cuts have hit the tech industry. Last week, Facebook parent Meta Platforms said it would cut around 10,000 jobs over the coming months, its second wave of layoffs.