NOS News••Amended
The American company Amazon will cut another 9,000 jobs worldwide in the coming weeks. It is the second major round of layoffs at the tech giant. In January, 18,000 employees lost their jobs.
CEO Andy Jassy announced the news in an email to staff. Cloud service AWS, the advertising branch and streaming service Twitch, among others, are affected by the new round of layoffs. The thousands of jobs that the multinational is cutting represent a fraction of the total workforce of 1.6 million worldwide.
Amazon has a delivery center at Schiphol in the Netherlands. Trade union FNV estimates that between 150 and 200 people work there. It is unclear whether this round of layoffs will affect the employees there.
Turbulent period
“It was a difficult decision, but one that we believe is best for the company in the long run,” Jassy writes in the publicly posted post on the website. Like other large tech companies, Amazon, after years of profit growth, is in a turbulent period with disappointing annual figures.
Jassy explains in the message why there has been a delay in announcing the new mass layoffs. In the previous round of layoffs, not all teams would have completed their analysis. According to the CEO, it has been decided to provide clarity to those affected as soon as possible.
Lockdown boom
During the corona pandemic, Amazon has hired many new employees. Because of the lockdown, ordering products via web stores had taken off enormously. Hundreds of thousands of vacancies were filled to meet demand.
But as with other major tech companies in the US, profits have been declining since 2021, partly due to economic headwinds. With the caveat that ‘the big five’ together still make many tens of billions of profits per year. Only Amazon closed 2022 in the red.
Another tech company that laid off employees en masse in January was Google’s parent company, Alphabet. There, 12,000 people lost their jobs, or 6 percent of the workforce. In November last year, Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, cut 11,000 jobs.
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