Amazon is set to lay off around 10,000 employees, according to multiple reports, representing the company’s biggest round of job cuts ever — yet still just a small fraction of its total headcount.
Amazon is preparing to lay off about 10,000 employees, according to the New York Times on Monday. The online sales platform would thus become the latest American tech giant to respond to the economic crisis with a large-scale social plan.
In January 2022, Amazon employed 3,960 people in Luxembourg (its European HQ) and over 1.6 million people worldwide.
A 10,000 jobs cut would represent just under 1% of the company’s payroll.
The company had already announced a hiring freeze in its offices two weeks ago.
Amazon did not react immediately when contacted by AFP.
According to the Times, the cuts will focus on Amazon’s devices organisation (Luxembourg has a team here as well), including the voice-assistant Alexa, as well as at its retail division and in human resources.
Karen Weise, for the NYTimes, says Amazon cutting jobs during the ‘critical holiday shopping season’ — when the company usually performs well — shows “how quickly the souring global economy has put pressure on it to trim businesses that have been overstaffed or under-delivering for years.”
Amazon doubled its work force in two years (the Covid-19 pandemic produced a very profitable set of quarters for the company), and re-invested its profits into expanding the business.
However, earlier this year, Amazon’s growth slowed and now, according to the Times, ‘the company faces high costs from decisions to overinvest’ and rapidly expand, while changes in shopping habits and high inflation have dented sales.
Including today’s announcement, there have been more than 30,000 employees cut from the tech sector in November alone.
Other companies cutting staff this month:
- Meta (Facebook and Instagram’s parent company announced the loss of 11,000 jobs, or about 13% of its workforce),
- Twitter (freshly acquired by Elon Musk, fired about half of its 7,500 employees to date.)
- Salesforce (1,000)
- Stripe (1,000)
- Lyft (700)
- Redfin (850)
- Opendoor (550)
- Zendesk (350).
Christos Floros and Dani Lodhi worked on this story.
Do you work for Amazon in Luxembourg? Are you affected by these jobs cuts? You may get in touch with Christos at christos.floros@rtl.lu