This announcement of the Director General of the online commerce giant is a new major sign of the difficulties of the technology sector in the United States.
MO12345lemonde with AP and AFP
Estimated in November at 10,000 job cuts, the wave of layoffs that will touch Amazon is actually higher. In a message on the site of the American electronic commerce giant, its managing director Andy Jassy said that Amazon has revised his estimate on the rise and “plans to remove just over 18,000 positions”, including in Europe. This is the reduction of the most massive personnel in the history of the company of Seattle.
Without specifying the distribution of these job cuts, the manager, who specifies having decided to announce “these news quickly” because they were “revealed” by an employee, mentions that the employees impacted “or else Their representatives, if necessary, in Europe “will be contacted by the company on January 18. He declares that the layoffs will mainly affect the physical stores of the company, which include Amazon Fresh and Amazon Go, as well as certain internal services such as human resources.
“The examination of our annual planning (….) was more difficult this year given economic uncertainty and the fact that we have hired massively in recent years,” said Amazon.
anemic growth compared to its standards
The distribution group indeed hired in turn during the pandemic to respond to the explosion of demand, thus doubling its world staff between early 2020 and early 2022. The group had at the end of September 1.54 million ‘Employees around the world, without including seasonal workers recruited during increased activity period, especially during the holiday season.
“Amazon has resisted uncertain and difficult savings in the past, and we will continue to do so,” says the boss of the American group. “These changes will help us continue our long -term opportunities with a more solid cost structure (…). Companies that last a long time go through different phases. They are not in massive staff expansion every year,” continues -il.
Amazon saw its net profit drop by 9 % over a year in the third quarter. And for the last quarter, Amazon anticipated anemic growth in November with regard to its standards, between 2 % and 8 % over one year, and an operational profit between $ 0 and 4 billion dollars, compared to 3.5 for the same Period of 2021. The group must announce its annual results on 1 er February.
The tech sector in difficulty
This job cuts plan is the largest among recent staff discounts that affect the technology sector in the United States. Large platforms with an advertising economic model face the budget cuts of advertisers, which reduce their expenses in the face of inflation and the rise in interest rates.
Meta, Facebook’s parent company, announced in November the abolition of 11,000 jobs, or about 13 % of its workforce. At the end of August, Snapchat eliminated around 20 % of its workforce, or more than 1,200 employees. Twitter, bought in October by Elon Musk, has dismissed about half of his 7,500 employees.
Latest, the American computer group Salesforce, specializing in management solutions and the cloud (remote computer), announced Wednesday to separate around 10 % of its employees, or just under 8,000 Posts.