After a strategic review, Amazon intends to lay off 9,000 more employees — on top of the 18,000 job cuts it previously announced, CEO Andy Jassy said Monday.The latest round of cuts will mostly affect employees in Amazon Web Services (AWS), People, Experience and Technology (PXT), advertising and Twitch divisions, according to Jassy. The company’s senior management team expects to make final decisions on which jobs will be eliminated by “mid to late April,” the CEO said.“This was a difficult decision, but one that we think is best for the company long term,” Jassy wrote.The announcement of layoffs at Twitch follows CEO Emmett Shear’s resignation last week from the post after 16 years at the livestreaming platform.Jassy said economic “uncertainty” drove the decision to make the latest round of layoffs after several years of Amazon businesses adding “a significant amount of headcount.” As of Dec. 31, 2022, the ecommerce giant had about 1.541 million full-time and part-time employees, up nearly 19% compared with 1.298 million a year prior.“For several years leading up to this one, most of our businesses added a significant amount of headcount,” Jassy wrote in the memo, which Amazon shared publicly. “This made sense given what was happening in our businesses and the economy as a whole. However, given the uncertain economy in which we reside, and the uncertainty that exists in the near future, we have chosen to be more streamlined in our costs and headcount.”Even with the additional cuts, Amazon will engage in “limited hiring” in “strategic areas where we’ve prioritized allocating more resources,” Jassy said, without elaborating.For the fourth quarter of 2022, Amazon sales were up 9% year over year while net income came in at $278 million (compared with $14.3 billion a year earlier) on higher costs and charges, including $640 million in severance-related expenses. For the first quarter of 2023, Amazon expects sales to grow between 4% and 8% compared with the year-earlier period, in-line with Wall Street forecasts. CFO Brian Olsavsky last month said Amazon anticipates slower growth rates “for the next few quarters.”
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