Specialist Philip Finale, right, works with traders at the post on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, June 16, 2017. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)
Amazon is set to slash 9,000 more workers in addition to earlier cuts the e-commerce giant has already made.
In a March 20 memo to staff, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said the latest round is expected to impact Amazon’s cloud computing, advertising, human resources, and Twitch units. This latest round of job cuts follows several cuts made beginning November 2022. So far, more than 18,000 staffers have lost their jobs, CNBC reported
Amazon laid off more employees due to cost streamlining and current economic times. And because of the “uncertainty that exists in the near future,” Jassy said. “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,” Jassy said.
These layoffs come after the company had a hiring spree during the covid-19 pandemic. The company’s global workforce increased to more than 1.6 million by the end of 2021, up from 798,000 in the fourth quarter of 2019.
The Amazon news comes as the country might be bracing for a recession. According to experts, the current bond market seems to be predicting a recession is soon on the way.
With the bond market now pricing in a steeper path for monetary tightening by central banks globally, the danger of a recession has increased.
“It feels at this juncture that many central banks are still behind the curve, and there’s a lot of catching up to do,” Catherine Yeung, Hong Kong-based investment director at Fidelity International, told Bloomberg Radio. The market reflects the worries that “the harder the inflation nut will be to crack, the more damage will be done to the economy it’s sitting on,” Kit Juckes, chief currency strategist at Societe Generale SA, wrote in a note on March 8.
Specialist Philip Finale, right, works with traders at the post that handles Walmart on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, June 16, 2017. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)
