By BY KAREN WEISE from NYT Technology https://ift.tt/8h5fzZC
Amazon plans to lay off 9,000 corporate and tech workers by the end of April, adding to the 18,000 roles it already cut late last year and this January, Andy Jassy, the company’s chief executive, said in a note to employees on Monday.
The new layoffs, which amount to roughly 3 percent of its corporate work force, will target workers in some of Amazon’s most profitable divisions, which had previously been spared, including Amazon’s cloud computing business and its advertising operations. Those two segments of the business are much higher-margin operations than Amazon’s core retail business, according to financial analysts and filings.
Mr. Jassy wrote that the company’s leaders wrapped up their annual planning session last week, where they focused on streamlining costs and head count.
“The overriding tenet of our annual planning this year was to be leaner while doing so in a way that enables us to still invest robustly in the key long-term customer experiences that we believe can meaningfully improve customers’ lives and Amazon as a whole,” he wrote.
In the latest quarter, which ended in December, Amazon reported almost no profit, driven in part by unexpected weakness in its cloud computing business.
The new cuts will also hit Twitch, the livestreaming site that Amazon bought in 2014, and human resources groups, Mr. Jassy’s note said.
Amazon’s share price was down more than 2 percent in midday trading on Monday.
Mr. Jassy said management had not yet determined the workers who would be laid off, but it expected to do so by mid to late April. He said the company could still pursue some “limited hiring” in strategic areas.
via: nytimes.com
