By John Ikani
Amazon is planning to lay off around 10,000 employees in corporate and technology roles beginning this week, in what would amount to its biggest of such reduction to date.
According to a report by New York Times citing anonymous sources, the job cuts will target the devices group, including the one responsible for the Alexa voice assistant, along with the retail division and human resources.
Sacking 10,000 employees would roughly represent 3% of the company’s corporate employees and less than 1% of its global workforce of nearly 16 lakh.
Several other technology companies have also announced layoffs over the last few weeks.
Last week, Twitter had said it has laid off 50% of its workers across the world after Tesla founder Elon Musk took over the microblogging platform on October 27. In the same week, Meta Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg had announced firing over 11,000 employees, reducing the company’s staff strength by 13%.
Lyft, Stripe, Snap and other tech firms have also laid off workers in recent months.
A recent report from market analysis firm Finbold found Amazon had lost 45% of its value in the past year, from $1.6 trillion on Jan. 1 to $939 billion on Nov. 3. Other companies, including Apple and Microsoft, also saw drops in value.
On Oct. 27, Amazon announced in its third-quarter financial results that its net sales had increased more than 15% compared with last year, but operating income decreased to $2.5 billion compared with the $4.9 billion operating income in the same time span last year
A New York Times report from Oct. 4 said Amazon would freeze corporate hiring in its retail business for the rest of the year, but Amazon said it has plans to hire roughly 150,000 people for open seasonal, full-time and part-time roles “across its operations network in the US to help deliver for customers during the holidays.”
