Amazon plans to lay off another 9,000 employees

“Given the uncertain economy we live in, and the uncertainty that exists for the foreseeable future, we have chosen to streamline our costs and workforce more,” said Mr Jassy, ​​noting that the layoffs come after Amazon announced its annual planning process.

The company previously said it was cutting 18,000 jobs.

Waves of job losses have rocked the technology industry. Amazon is the latest company to cut more jobs than previously expected. Last week, Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc.

said it would cut about 10,000 jobs in the coming months, the second wave of mass layoffs.

Amazon invested heavily in expanding its workforce during the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, as people shifted much of their purchases online. The company added about 800,000 employees between the end of 2019 and the end of 2021, mainly in its hundreds of warehouses. were unprofitable and froze hiring.

Mr. Jassy said the 9,000 additional job cuts had not been announced earlier because some teams had not completed assessments determining which positions to cut. He said the cuts would be completed by mid to late April. Amazon had about 1.5 million employees worldwide at the end of December. It employed about 350,000 workers before the recent layoffs.

Since 2022, layoffs at tech companies have risen to about 300,000 workers, according to Layoffs.fyi, a site that tracks industry job losses.

Amazon has been going through one of the most difficult periods in its history. The company recently completed the layoff of 18,000 employees, or about 5% of the total. Those cuts were concentrated in the appliance business and the recruiting and retail business.

In addition to the announced job cuts, Amazon has made other changes that are likely to result in higher voluntary turnover than in recent years. The company is not adjusting its stock compensation plans, meaning many employees will effectively see their pay cuts this year, The Wall Street Journal reports. Amazon recently announced a return-to-office plan starting next month that has not been well received by some employees.

The job cuts at Amazon’s cloud computing unit come as cloud customers wanted to save money on infrastructure and software costs, said Rick Villars, an analyst at IDC. At the same time, new growth opportunities for cloud companies, such as in artificial intelligence, are not yet having a significant impact, he said.

“As Amazon is one of the biggest players in the cloud arena, it will show in their numbers,” said Mr. Villars. Cloud spending in the US grew 27% in the fourth quarter, lower than the 31% average growth rate of the previous four quarters, according to market analysis firm Synergy Research Group.

Brian Olsavsky, Amazon’s chief financial officer, said that month that the company had seen a continued slowdown in AWS spending as customers tried to rein in costs. Amazon’s advertising business, which has become an increasingly meaningful sales engine, also saw a slowdown in the fourth quarter, with sales up 19%. AWS, said Mr. Olsavsky, would likely face challenges in the coming quarters.

AWS posted an operating income of $22.8 billion last year. The rest of the company combined had an operating loss of $10.6 billion.

Amazon has also cut back on projects and pulled back investments in certain areas. Earlier this month, it confirmed it was halting construction on a massive corporate real estate complex near Washington, D.C., which it calls its second headquarters, or HQ2. While the first phase of the project is nearing completion, Amazon originally planned to break ground on the second phase of the project, which will include three 22-story office buildings, in the first quarter of 2023.

On the same day it revealed its plans for HQ2, it also said it would close eight of its cashier-less Amazon Go stores in Seattle, New York City, and San Francisco on April 1. The closures add to other problems Amazon has had in the physical retail sector, including closing its physical bookstores in 2022. The company has also canceled certain projects in recent months, such as the AmazonSmile charity program.

Amazon grew rapidly during the pandemic, supported by overwhelming demand for its e-commerce services. But like many of its tech peers, it’s been struggling with growth lately. The company warned in February that it could have a period of slower growth, including in its profitable AWS business, which experienced its lowest fourth-quarter growth rate since Amazon began separating segment performance in earnings.

—Dana Mattioli contributed to this article.

Write to Sebastian Herrera at sebastian.herrera@wsj.com and Joseph De Avila at joseph.deavila@wsj.com

Corrections and reinforcements
Amazon has about 350,000 employees. An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that the company has 35,000 employees. (Corrected March 20)