Amazon: 9,000 additional jobs will be cut

Europe 1 with AFP 18:28 p.m., March 20, 2023

Amazon will cut 9,000 additional jobs, which will be added to the 18,000 job cuts already announced in January, said Monday its chief executive, Andy Jassy, in a letter to the group's teams, published on its website. This is a new episode in the ongoing weight loss cure in the technology sector. The bulk of these new job cuts are in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud computing business, the PXT department dedicated to human resources management, the advertising workforce, as well as the Twitch video platform, said Andy Jassy.

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A 98% drop in net profit in the fourth quarter

The layoffs announced since early January represent about 1.7% of Amazon's workforce, which had 1.54 million employees worldwide at the end of 2022. Andy Jassy justified this second wave of job cuts by the fact that the analyses conducted in some services had taken longer than for others, but it is part of the same savings process that began in the fall. "Given the economic uncertainty and lack of visibility into the near future, we have decided to reduce our costs and headcount," explained the CEO, who succeeded founder Jeff Bezos in July 2021.

The Seattle giant, in the west of the United States, recorded in the fourth quarter of 2022 a 98% drop in net profit, well below what analysts expected. "For several years," before 2023, "most of our activities have increased their workforce significantly," which "made sense (at the time) given the evolution of our company and the economy," recalled Andy Jassy Monday.

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700,000 people recruited between the end of 2019 and the end of 2022

Between the end of 2019 and the end of 2022, Amazon recruited, net, 700,000 people, and thus increased the number of its employees by 83%. The end of lockdowns and the gradual return to the office have slowed down the trajectory of the group, which had experienced insolent growth with the Covid-19 pandemic and the acceleration of online commerce. Added to this was the US central bank's (Fed) monetary tightening cycle, which began in spring 2022, which sharply raised interest rates, to which the technology sector is particularly sensitive due to significant financing needs.