Massive layoffs at Amazon will exceed initial forecasts.
Until December 2022, everything indicated that the ecommerce giant’s job cuts were going to be of the order of 10,000 people, just below the layoffs of Meta Platforms, which reached 11,000.
However, the news of this Thursday, January 5, indicate that Amazon has decided that it will lay off 18,000 employeesa volume of unlinks never seen before on the world’s largest e-commerce platform.
The news was already communicated by the CEO of Amazon, Andy Jassy, through a note sent to all staff and which was seen by Reuters.
As stated in the email, the dismissals will begin to take place from next January 18.
What sectors will be affected? According to Jassy, the massive layoffs at Amazon will especially affect the segments related to e-commerce and human resources. No major layoffs are expected in warehouses (at least for now).
Mass layoffs at Amazon
To have a dimension of the massive layoffs at Amazon, it must be said that the company has close to 300,000 corporate employees, so the 18,000 represent approximately 6 percent of that workforce.
The decision is a drastic change in the management of human resources after having decided to double the base salary cap in order to compete more aggressively for the best talent.
In the note to employees, Jassy told them that the 2023 annual planning “has been more complicated than other years” because of “the uncertainty of the economy.”
In total, Amazon has more than 1,500,000 employees worldwide, including warehouse workers.
It is the second largest private employer in the US, behind only another giant and direct competitor, Walmart.
With the layoffs, the company is preparing for what is expected to be slower growth in the economy, against a backdrop of declining inflation but recession on the horizon.
This means that consumers cut back and buy less, with the consequent impact on Amazon accounts.
Amazon shares, in this scenario, fell 50 percent in 2022.
In November, Amazon began a path of layoffs, especially in its device-related divisions like Alexa. At that time, there was talk of a total of 10,000 cuts.
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