Amazon.com Inc is laying off more than 18,000 employees — the biggest corporate workforce reduction in company history — in the latest sign that a tech industry slump is deepening.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy on Wednesday announced the move in a memo to staff, saying it followed the company’s annual planning process.
The cuts, which began last year, were previously expected to affect about 10,000 people. The reduction is concentrated in the company’s corporate ranks, mostly Amazon’s retail division and human resources functions such as recruiting.
Photo: Bloomberg
“Amazon has weathered uncertain and difficult economies in the past, and we will continue to do so,” Jassy said. “These changes will help us pursue our long-term opportunities with a stronger cost structure.”
Even though the prospect of layoffs has loomed over Amazon for months — the company has said that it hired too many people during the COVID-19 pandemic — the increasing total suggests that the company’s outlook has darkened.
Amazon joins other tech giants in making major cuts.
Earlier on Wednesday, Salesforce Inc announced plans to lay off about 10 percent of its workforce and reduce its real-estate holdings, after the enterprise software company said it hired too many people during a pandemic-fueled boom and is adjusting to more cautious spending by customers.
The workforce moves should be completed by the end of fiscal year 2024, Salesforce, which has about 80,000 employees, said in a regulatory filing.
Amazon’s plan to lay off 18,000 workers would be the biggest cut yet for tech firms during the current slowdown, but the e-commerce giant also has a far bigger workforce than its Silicon Valley peers. It had more than 1.5 million employees as of the end of September last year, meaning the latest cuts would represent about 1 percent of the workforce.
At the time the company was planning its cuts in November, a spokesperson said that Amazon had about 350,000 corporate employees worldwide.
The world’s largest online retailer spent the end of last year adjusting to a sharp slowdown in e-commerce growth as shoppers returned to pre-pandemic habits.
Amazon delayed warehouse openings and halted hiring in its retail group. It broadened the freeze to the company’s staff and then began making cuts.
Jassy has eliminated or curtailed experimental and unprofitable businesses, including teams working on a telehealth service, a delivery robot and a children’s video-calling device, among other projects.
The Seattle-based company also is trying to align excess capacity with cooling demand.
One effort includes trying to sell excess space on its cargo planes, people familiar with the matter said.
Amazon is seeing parts of its business level off, but it continues to invest in its cloud-computing and advertising businesses, as well as video streaming.
In Wednesday’s memo, Jassy said the company would provide severance, transitional health benefits and job placement to affected workers.
He also chided an employee for leaking the news, an apparent reference to a Wall Street Journal report.
The company plans to begin discussing the moves with affected employees on Jan. 18, he said.
“Companies that last a long time go through different phases,” Jassy said. “They’re not in heavy people expansion mode every year.”
GROWING OWINGS: While Luxembourg and China swapped the top three spots, the US continued to be the largest exposure for Taiwan for the 41st consecutive quarter The US remained the largest debtor nation to Taiwan’s banking sector for the 41st consecutive quarter at the end of September, after local banks’ exposure to the US market rose more than 2 percent from three months earlier, the central bank said. Exposure to the US increased to US$198.896 billion, up US$4.026 billion, or 2.07 percent, from US$194.87 billion in the previous quarter, data released by the central bank showed on Friday. Of the increase, about US$1.4 billion came from banks’ investments in securitized products and interbank loans in the US, while another US$2.6 billion stemmed from trust assets, including mutual funds,
AI TALENT: No financial details were released about the deal, in which top Groq executives, including its CEO, would join Nvidia to help advance the technology Nvidia Corp has agreed to a licensing deal with artificial intelligence (AI) start-up Groq, furthering its investments in companies connected to the AI boom and gaining the right to add a new type of technology to its products. The world’s largest publicly traded company has paid for the right to use Groq’s technology and is to integrate its chip design into future products. Some of the start-up’s executives are leaving to join Nvidia to help with that effort, the companies said. Groq would continue as an independent company with a new chief executive, it said on Wednesday in a post on its Web
JOINT EFFORTS: MediaTek would partner with Denso to develop custom chips to support the car-part specialist company’s driver-assist systems in an expanding market MediaTek Inc (聯發科), the world’s largest mobile phone chip designer, yesterday said it is working closely with Japan’s Denso Corp to build a custom automotive system-on-chip (SoC) solution tailored for advanced driver-assistance systems and cockpit systems, adding another customer to its new application-specific IC (ASIC) business. This effort merges Denso’s automotive-grade safety expertise and deep vehicle integration with MediaTek’s technologies cultivated through the development of Media- Tek’s Dimensity AX, leveraging efficient, high-performance SoCs and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities to offer a scalable, production-ready platform for next-generation driver assistance, the company said in a statement yesterday. “Through this collaboration, we are bringing two
Even as the US is embarked on a bitter rivalry with China over the deployment of artificial intelligence (AI), Chinese technology is quietly making inroads into the US market. Despite considerable geopolitical tensions, Chinese open-source AI models are winning over a growing number of programmers and companies in the US. These are different from the closed generative AI models that have become household names — ChatGPT-maker OpenAI or Google’s Gemini — whose inner workings are fiercely protected. In contrast, “open” models offered by many Chinese rivals, from Alibaba (阿里巴巴) to DeepSeek (深度求索), allow programmers to customize parts of the software to suit their
RSS