Amazon on Tuesday began laying off some employees in its advertising unit as a part of cost-cutting plans announced last month. According to a CNBC report, Amazon’s senior vice president of advertising, IMDb, and Grand Challenge Paul Kotas sent a note to staffers informing them of the layoffs.
It’s unclear how many people are being let go across the advertising unit. However, the report added that this is part of the announcement made last month. CEO Andy Jassy said that Amazon would lay off 9,000 employees. This is on top of the 18,000 cuts already announced last November and in January.
Paul Kotas' memo said, “As Andy shared a few weeks ago, throughout the 2023 planning process, we’ve been scrupulously prioritizing resources with an eye toward maximizing benefits to customers and the long-term health of our business. For Ads, this process has involved reallocating resources by shifting team members, slowing down or stopping certain programs, or concluding we didn’t have the right skills in place to address our priorities. As a result, we have made deeply-considered decisions about how best to move forward, resulting in role eliminations for a small percentage of our organization.”
READ: Amazon To Lay Off Over 100 Employees From Gaming Division, Reassign Some Personnel To Other Projects
The earlier cuts were primarily focused on retail, devices, recruiting, and human resources groups. The company started informing affected workers via email on Tuesday morning, the report said citing two affected employees.
Following a hiring frenzy during the Covid epidemic, Amazon is currently going through the largest layoffs in its 29-year history.
Earlier this month, Amazon announced that it will be laying off over 100 employees from its gaming division.
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.
Moreover, Amazon has reportedly scaled back or shut down entire services like its virtual primary care offering for employers.