Facing a slowdown in sales, Amazon plans to lay off about 10,000 employees in corporate and technology positions, starting as soon as this week, the New York Times reported.
Citing anonymous sources, the Times reported that the layoffs will be concentrated on Amazon’s devices group, including the Alexa voice assistant, along with its retail and HR groups. The job cuts — which would be the largest in Amazon’s history — would represent about 3% of corporate headcount. The layoffs would represent less than 1% of Amazon’s total employee base of more than 1.5 million, mostly comprised of hourly workers.
Amazon did not respond to a request for comment. The reported job cuts at Amazon come after other tech companies have axed their workforces, including meta, Snap and Twitter.
Even with the layoffs in corporate jobs, Amazon last month said it intends to hire 150,000 employees throughout the U.S. in full-time, part-time and seasonal roles across its operations network to handle the expected 2022 holiday-shopping surge. The ecommerce giant expects revenue growth to slow down considerably in Q4, projecting net sales for the year-end quarter to be between $140 billion and $148 billion, or to grow between 2% and 8% compared with Q4 2021.
Per the Times report, Amazon two weeks ago froze corporate hiring across the company including the AWS cloud computing division for the next few months.
In announcing Q3 earnings, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said the company has “a set of initiatives that we’re methodically working through that we believe will yield a stronger cost structure for the business moving forward.“
“There is obviously a lot happening in the macroeconomic environment, and we’ll balance our investments to be more streamlined without compromising our key long-term, strategic bets,” Jassy said.
