Amazon shares fell 2.5% this Monday and not precisely because of the announcement of its owner, Jeff Bezos, to donate almost all of his 124,000 million in life.
No, the matter was different and a contradiction to his generosity. Although the holiday season is just around the corner, a peak moment for consumption, Amazon plans to cut some 10,000 jobs in corporate and technology occupations, according to The New York Times, as part of a wide reduction review. of costs.
This cut will be the largest in the company's history and will have a major impact on device organization, the retail division and human resources. The layoffs, which will begin this week, represent less than 1% of the digital supermarket's global workforce and 3% of its corporate employees.
It is further proof that winter has fallen on tech. After making a killing during the pandemic, where their bottom lines soared, other Silicon Valley firms have begun terminating contracts en masse. Meta, society in which Facebook is framed. Instagram or Whastapp announced last week a cut of 13% of the workforce, which is equivalent to 11,000 employees, while Twitter, under the command of Elos Musk, has done the same with 50% of the more than 7,500 employees.
According to its own numbers, Amazon had 798,000 employees at the beginning of 2020, but at the end of December 2021, it had 1.6 million full-time and part-time workers, which is equivalent to a 102% increase. The Times noted that the layoffs at Bezos' company were "a fluid issue" that could change.
The holiday season is a critical time for Amazon, and the company typically ramped up hiring to meet increased demand. But Andy Jassy, who became CEO in July 2021, has applied a cost-cutting model to preserve the company's "cash" and confront falling sales and a gloomy outlook for the global economy.
The large business conglomerate had previously announced its intention to freeze hiring at the corporate level and in the minority business sector. In recent months, Amazon has closed its telehealth service, paused a peculiar video call projector for children and closed all call centers except one, eliminated its itinerant delivery robot, closed the least profitable physical malls and closed, canceled or delayed some new distribution warehouse projects.
A few days ago it reported disappointing earnings in the third quarter of the year that scared investors and sank the value of the shares by more than 13%. It was the first time that Amazon had reached a market capitalization below $1 trillion since April 2020. This prompted a stock sell-off that resulted in virtually all gains from pandemic-era growth being wiped out. The shares have fallen about 41% this year.
