Amazon to further reduce workforce by 9,000 as 18,000 employees were already laid off in January.

Following its rapid expansion during the COVID-19 pandemic, Amazon (AMZN) is now struggling with slow online sales that have resulted in the need to lay off an additional 9,000 workers. This comes on top of the 18,000 jobs it cut earlier this year.

CEO Andy Jassy has written to the staff about the recent job cuts, which will primarily affect the AWS cloud services, the PXT department, advertising, and the Twitch online gaming streaming platform.

Jassy stated in the memo that due to the unpredictable financial situation we are currently facing and the lack of certainty for the coming days, we have decided to reduce our expenses and staff in a more efficient manner.

Our main focus for this year's planning was to be more efficient while still being able to invest in important customer experiences that we believe can have a significant impact on customers' lives and the overall success of Amazon. We aim to achieve this by streamlining our operations and cutting down on unnecessary expenses. However, we realize the importance of prioritizing customer satisfaction and long-term growth, and will ensure that our investments reflect these values.

Jassy stated that Amazon refrained from declaring the 9,000 job cuts concurrently with the prior 18,000 in January owing to the absence of a complete analysis of its departments. The company didn't want to hasten the assessment process.

Photo credit: Budrul Chukrut/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images This picture shows the logo of Amazon Web Services, a cloud computing platform that belongs to American company Amazon, on a smartphone. The background displays an economic stock exchange index graph.

Amazon faced a challenging year in 2022 as people started resuming their pre-pandemic shopping habits, causing fewer consumers to rely solely on online shopping. Consequently, the company found itself overstaffed. This was despite the fact that Amazon had significantly increased its number of employees by 93.5% between the fourth quarter of 2019 and the third quarter of 2022.

During the announcement of their fourth quarter earnings, Amazon declared a total loss of $2.7 billion for the year. The concerning news is that Amazon failed to meet the predicted Q4 earnings for their AWS division according to Wall Street experts. The reported sales amounted to $21.3 billion, lower than the anticipated $21.76 billion.

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It's not just Amazon that had to ramp up job cuts. Recently, Meta declared that it will terminate 10,000 positions before the end of this year and cancel 5,000 open vacancies that were previously available. The prominent social media company had previously downsized its workforce by letting go of approximately 11,000 employees in November 2022.

Alphabet (GOOG, GOOGL) and Microsoft (MSFT) terminated about 10,000 and 12,000 employees correspondingly during the early months of 2023. This move was a component of their independent measures to diminish their expenditures.

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